Make Mulled Wine With A Processor Heatsink!

December 25, 2016 by James Hobson 13 Comments

Now, over the holiday season there seems to be a predilection towards making merry and bright. As many an engineer and otherwise are sure to note, fine alcohols will facilitate this process. One such warm holiday beverage is mulled wine; there are many traditions on how to make it, but a singular approach to preparing the beverage would be to re-purpose an old PC and a CPU liquid cooling unit into a mulled wine heating station.

Four years ago, [Adam] found himself staring at a pile of mostly obsolete PCs in his IT office and pondering how they could be better used. He selected one that used a power-hungry Pentium 4 — for its high heat output — strapped a liquid cooling block to the CPU and pumped it full of the holiday drink. It takes a few hours to heat three liters of wine up to an ideal 60 Celsius, but that’s just in time for lunch! The Christmastime aroma wafting through the office is nice too.

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Playing StarCraft On An ARM

July 31, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

Starcraft

Except for the really terrible Nintendo 64 port, StarCraft has always been bound to desktop and laptop PCs. Blizzard could take the code for StarCraft, port it to an ARM platform, put a version on the Google Play an iTunes store, and sit there while the cash rolls in. This would mean a ton of developer time, though, and potentially years tracking down hard to find bugs.

Or one random dude on the Internet could port StarCraft to an ARM platform. Yes, this means all the zerg rushes and dark templar ambushes you could possibly want are available for tablets and Raspberry Pis.

This godlike demonstration of compiler wizardry is a months-long project of [notaz] over on the OpenPandora team. Without the source for StarCraft, [notaz] was forced to disassemble the Win32 version of the game, convert the disassembly to C with some custom tools, and recompile it for ARM while linking in all the necessary Win32 API calls from the ARM port of Wine. Saying this was not easy is an understatement.

If you have an OpenPandora and want to relive your heady days of youth, you can grab everything you need here. For anyone without an OpenPandora that wants to play StarCraft on a Raspi, you might want to get working on your own recompiled port. Video below.

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Automated Decanting Machine Pairs Wine With Pi

January 12, 2014 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

[Logi.cals], a German software company focused on process, automation, and facilities planning has devised an automated wine decanting machine to demonstrate its logi.CAD 3 PLC programming tool. Sommeliers use these simple machines to handle heavy, expensive bottles of wine. [Logi.cals] added sensors and a stepper motor to a very nice looking specimen and automated the decanting process with a Raspberry Pi.

The outstanding feature of this design is the built-in redundancy. A pair of micro switches detect the presence of both a bottle and a glass. Failing these, a load cell is there to weigh the bottle, reporting naturally whether one is present. The load cell also plays a part in monitoring the liquid level in the bottle, as do capacitive sensors that register the wine flow. The design also includes strain gauges that measure the weight in the glass as well as the liquid level. To bring it full circle, they also verify that a glass is present.

[Logi.cals] used two expansion boards, the Quick2Wire interface with an I²C analogue board and the PiFace. The I²C analogue board takes information from the strain gauges over its ADC, and the Quick2Wire communicates with the load cell’s measurement amplifier over the serial connection. The PiFace handles the remaining sensors and the stepper motor, and provides high voltage protection for the Pi.

If you’re fresh out of heavy, expensive bottles of wine but have some cheap ones lying around, you could use a Pi to make them dance.

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Temperature Controlled Wine Cellar Substitute

March 18, 2013 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

temperature-controlled-wine-cellar-substitute

Serious wine enthusiasts keep their bottles in a room built for the task. If you don’t have that kind of space you can still fabricate a similar storage environment. This foam box keeps stored wine at a controlled temperature. It also keeps light off of the precious goods. [Michael] built it himself to use in his apartment and published a description of the build process.

He picked up some foil-coated foam board from the home store. Six sections come together into a box about the size of a mini-fridge; 24″ by 24″. A square hole was cut in the center of the top section. This receives the smaller of two heat sinks mounted to a Peltier cooler. The temperature inside is monitored by a thermistor which [Michael] tore out of an old iPod battery. To give him some visual feedback on the internal temperature he added that yellow and black striped meat thermometer.

Since this is for long-term storage, we’d bet the system is rather efficient. As long as the door isn’t frequently opened the temperature change should be quite slow thanks to the insulation and the cool liquid in wine bottles.

Loudest Telepresence Robot Ever

March 30, 2012 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

This telepresence robot will never let your Skype callers sneak up on you. [Priit] built the project, which he calls Skype Got Legs, so that his distant friends could follow him around the house during chats. But as you can hear after the break, the electric drills used to motorize the base are extremely loud.

Noise pollution aside, we like the roughness of the hack. It’s utilitarian but seems to work quite well. Commands are sent via the web using a combination of Ajax and PHP function calls. The two drills are controlled by an Arduino via a couple of automotive relays. The drills are powered by their original rechargeable battery packs. So as not to alter those batteries, [Priit] figured out a way to use synthetic wine bottle corks as a connector. They’ve been cut to size, and had tinned wires pushed through holes in them. Now, when he inserts the altered corks they press the wires against the battery contacts. Continue reading “Loudest Telepresence Robot Ever” →

Ikea Wine Rack Originally Sold As A Mattress Holder

November 7, 2011 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

[Jeremy Walworth] has been dumpster diving again. He noticed that his neighbor had a bucked of nice-looking wood out at the curb for garbage collection. He inquired about it and learned that it was an Ikea bed that had broken, and that the original hardware was still there in a separate bag. He dragged it to his lair and built this wine rack out of the parts.

The reused rails and hardware provide five shelves for the bottles. [Jeremy] wanted each vessel to stay in place if the shelf wasn’t full, so he grabbed a piece of mill work from the home store and cut dividers which were glued in place. Now he’s able to show off up to sixty bottles for just a couple of bucks in material expense.

It seems like Ikea is able to sell furniture for less than the cost of the materials sourced locally. We think this is a fantastic way to find parts for your own hacks, as the components that break can often be cut down to undamaged pieces. We also make sure to check the As-Is section on each visit for the ‘leftovers’ that are usually sold for pennies. Who know’s maybe you’ll find the parts you need to build a camera mount for documenting projects.

Wine Glass Time Keeper

January 16, 2010 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

We’ve seen a glut of time-keeping projects lately. We guess time was the original motivator for technology so we’re okay with it (but we’re not calling ourselves Clockaday quite yet). This clock, or more appropriately this timer, is a homemade hourglass that [Andrei] put together. The finished look is simple but he put some real time into its production.

The glass portion is a combination of two wine glasses. He removed the stems, ground the bottoms flat, then drilled holes to allow the sand to pass. He used plumbers putty around the top of the upturned reservoir to create a temporary bowl of water which cooled the glass during drilling. This prevented cracking by keeping the friction generated heat at bay. Working with the glass took a total of around five hours.

To assemble, he epoxied the two wine glasses together, routed out a ring in the wood bases for the lips, and used dowels to connect the two ends. [Andrei] concluded that the gentle slope at the bottom of the wine glasses is not the ideal shape as some sand can get stuck in them. Perhaps champagne flutes for his next build? At any rate, we think it’s a unique, non-automated hourglass build.