DIY Shredder Creates Insulation

October 23, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 28 Comments

Plenty of us have experience with paper shredders, but there are all kinds of machines designed to completely destroy other materials as well, from metal and plastic, to entire cars. [Action BOX] built their own heavy-duty shredder capable of dismantling things like cell phones and other robust handheld objects, but after seeing what it would physically shred they decided to give it an actual job creating insulation for the attic space in their garage.

The shredder itself uses opposing metal plates arranged on sets of two cylinders, with each cylinder powered by it’s own large motor. In total, the entire system uses around 1.5 kW, so to make their green insulation project as green as possible they decided to power it with an equivalent amount of solar panels. For the insulation they’re using a year’s worth of boxes from various deliveries, and after a time-consuming process preparing the boxes for the shredder, shredding the strips of cardboard, and packaging it in garbage bags their efforts netted them enough to partially fill the space between four ceiling joists. Continue reading “DIY Shredder Creates Insulation” →

Beehive In A Bottle

January 21, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 49 Comments

One of the most common types of beekeeping hive is based around the Langstroth hive, first patented in the United States in 1852. While it does have some nice features like movable frames, the march of history has progressed considerably while this core of beekeeping practices has changed very little. But that really just means that beekeeping as a hobby is rife with opportunities for innovation, and [Advoko] is pioneering his own modern style of beehive.

In nature, bees like to live inside of things like hollowed-out tree trunks, so he has modeled his hive design after that by basing it around large inverted plastic bottles. Bees can enter in the opening at the bottle and build their comb inside from the top down. The bottles can be closed and moved easily without contacting the bees, and he even creates honey supers out of smaller bottles which allows honey to be harvested without disturbing the core beehive.There are a number of strategies to improve the bees’ stay in the bottles as well, such as giving them wooden skewers in the bottle to build their comb on and closing the bottles in insulation to help the hives regulate their temperature more evenly and to keep them dark.

He hopes this idea will help inspire those with an interest in the hobby who wouldn’t otherwise have the large amount of money it takes to set up even a few Langstroth-type hives. Even if you don’t live in a part of the world where the Langstroth hive is common, this system still should be possible to get up and running with a minimum of financial investment. Once you’ve started, though, take a look at some other builds which augment the hive with some monitoring technology.

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Being Green, It’s A Rich Man’s Game

October 26, 2021 by Jenny List 245 Comments

It’s an old saying with an apocryphal origin: “May you live in interesting times“. We Brits are certainly living in interesting times at the moment, as a perfect storm of the pandemic, rising energy prices, global supply chain issues, and arguably the post-Brexit departure of EU-national truck drivers has given us shortages of everything from fresh vegetables in the supermarket to carbon dioxide for the food industry. Of particular concern is a shortage of automotive fuels at the filling station, and amid sometimes-aggressive queues for the pumps it’s reported that there’s a record uptick in Brits searching online for information about electric cars.

Nothing Like A Crisis To Make You Green

My VW Polo loaded for EMF 2018 — How I miss my little car, here loaded for EMF 2018.

This sudden interest in lower-carbon motoring may be driven by the queues rather than a concern for the planet, but it’s certainly true that as a culture we should be making this move if we are to have a hope of reducing our CO2 production and meeting our climate goals. A whole slew of lifestyle changes will have to be made over the coming years of which our car choices are only a part. Back to those beleaguered Brits again, a series of environmental protests have caused major disruption on the motorway network round London, not protesting against the traffic but campaigning for better home insulation.

For reasons of personal circumstance rather than principle, earlier this year I gave my trusty VW Polo to an old-Volks-nut friend and now rely on a bicycle. Living where I do within reach of everything I need it hasn’t been as challenging as I expected it to be, and aside from saving a bit of cash I know my general fitness level has gone up. Though I have less need for a car now than I used to, I intend to find myself another vehicle in due course so that I can do silly things such as throwing a Hackaday village in the back and driving halfway across Europe to a hacker camp. With an awareness that whatever I choose should be as good for the planet as I can make it then, I’ve been cruising the used-car websites to see what I can find.

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Repurposed Plastic Protects PCBs

June 6, 2019 by Brian McEvoy 28 Comments

An errant wire snipping across the wrong electrical pins spells the release of your magic smoke. Even if you are lucky, stray parts are the root of boundless malfunctions from disruptive to deadly. [TheRainHarvester] shares his trick for covering an Arduino Nano with some scrap plastic most of us have sitting in the recycling bin. The video is also after the break. He calls this potting, but we would argue it is a custom-made cover.

The hack is to cut a bit of plastic from food container lids, often HDPE or plastic #2. Trim a piece of it a tad larger than your unprotected board, and find a way to hold it in place so you can blast it with a heat gun. When we try this at one of our Hackaday remote labs and apply a dab of hot glue between the board and some green plastic it works well. The video suggests a metal jig which would be logical when making more than one. YouTube commenter and tip submitter [Keith o] suggests a vacuum former for a tighter fit, and we wouldn’t mind seeing custom window cutouts for access to critical board segments such as DIP switches or trimmers.

We understand why shorted wires are a problem, especially when you daisy-chain three power supplies as happened in one of [TheRainHarvester]’s previous videos.

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Growing Your Own Insulation

November 21, 2018 by Bryan Cockfield 45 Comments

The latest craze in revolutionary materials science is no longer some carbon nanotube, a new mysterious alloy, or biodegradeable plastic. It seems as though a lot of new developments are coming out of the biology world, specifically from mycologists who study fungi. While the jury’s still out on whether or not it’s possible to use fungi to build a decent Star Trek series, researchers have in fact been able to use certain kinds of it to build high-performing insulation.

The insulation is made of the part of the fungus called the mycelium, rather than its more familiar-looking fruiting body. The mycelium is a strand-like structure of fungus which grows through materials in order to digest them. This could be mulch, fruit, logs, straw, crude oil, or even live insects, and you might have noticed it because it’s often white and fuzzy-looking. The particular type of mycelium used here is extremely resistant to changes in temperature so is ideal for making insulation. As a bonus, it can be grown, not manufactured, and can use biological waste products as a growing medium. Further, it can grow to fit the space it’s given, and it is much less environmentally harmful than existing forms of insulation.

As far as performance is concerned, a reporter from the BBC tested it in an interesting video involving a frozen chocolate bar and a blowtorch, discovering also that the insulation is relatively flame-retardant. Besides insulation, though, there are many more atypical uses of fungi that have been discovered recently including pest control and ethanol creation. They can also be used to create self-healing concrete.

Thanks to [Michael] for the tip!

Photo of fungal mycelium: Tobi Kellner [CC BY-SA 3.0]

To Ferrule Or Not To Ferrule?

April 12, 2018 by Dan Maloney 116 Comments

We recently posted about a spectacular 3D-printer fire that was thankfully caught and extinguished before spreading to the hacker’s house or injuring his family. Analyzing the remains of the printer, the hacker determined that the fire was caused when a loose grub screw let the extruder’s heater cartridge fall out and touch the ABS fan shroud. It ran full-on and set things on fire.

A number of us have similar 3D printers, so the comments for this article were understandably lively, but one comment stood out by listing a number of best practices for wiring, including the use of ferrules. In particular, many 3D printers connect the heated bed, which draws a lot of current, with screw terminals to the motherboard. While not the cause of the fire in the original post, melted terminal blocks are a common complaint with many DIY 3D printer kits, and one reason is that simply jamming thick stranded wire into a screw terminal and hoping for the best can result in increased resistance, and heat, at the joint. In such situations, the absolutely right thing to do is to crimp on a ferrule. So let’s talk about that.

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Kapton: Miracle Material With A Tragic History

April 4, 2018 by Dan Maloney 63 Comments

On a balmy September evening in 1998, Swissair flight 111 was in big trouble. A fire in the cockpit ceiling had at first blinded the pilots with smoke, leaving them to rely on instruments to divert the plane, en route from New York to Geneva, to an emergency landing at Halifax Airport in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. But the fire raging above and behind the pilots, intense enough to melt the aluminum of the flight deck, consumed wiring harness after wiring harness, cutting power to vital flight control systems. With no way to control the plane, the MD-11 hit the Atlantic ocean about six miles off the coast. All 229 souls were lost.

It would take months to recover and identify the victims. The 350-g crash broke the plane into two million pieces which would not reveal their secrets until much later. But eventually, the problem was traced to a cascade of failures caused by faulty wiring in the new in-flight entertainment system that spread into the cockpit and doomed the plane. A contributor to these failures was the type of insulation used on the plane’s wiring, blamed by some as the root cause of the issue: the space-age polymer Kapton.

No matter where we are, we’re surrounded by electrical wiring. Bundles of wires course with information and power, and the thing that protects us is the thin skin of insulation over the conductor. We trust these insulators, and in general our faith is rewarded. But like any other engineered system, failure is always an option. At the time, Kapton was still a relatively new wonder polymer, with an unfortunate Achilles’ heel that can turn the insulator into a conductor, and at least in the case of flight 111, set a fire that would bring a plane down out of the sky.

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