Monitoring air quality with a $12 sensor

April 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Chris] has allergies, asthma, and uses a wood burning stove. You can imagine why testing his air quality might be something he’d be interested in. He has a very nice $290 laser particle counter, but was really curious how the $12 sharp sensor he found would stack up. To find out, he plugged it into an arduino and started logging both on pachube.

After a few different tests, like lighting a match, blowing it out, and letting the smoke flow into the sensors, he decided he needed something better. Cooking some pancakes turned out to be his ultimate method. After charting the dissipation of particles after cooking a nice batch of griddle cakes, he found the two sensors to be surprisingly similar.

Filed Under: home hacks Tagged With:

Automated Beer brewing

April 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Randyrob] is pretty serious about their beer. So serious, that he wanted to build a fully automated system for brewing. Dubbed the Halfluck Automated Brewing System, or HABS, it is actually his first micro controller project. You can follow along on the arduino forums to get a little more information, including the source code if you should want to build one of your own. There are a few videos on his youtube channel, but unfortunately, we didn’t notice any full tours of the entire thing.

Like some others we’ve seen, this one only handles the brewing aspect, not the fermenting stages. It would be interesting to see a system that handled it all. You could fairly easily get the machine to siphon it into a keg for final carbonation too.

Filed Under: beer hacks Tagged With: ,

2 horse power 3 wheeled beast

April 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This beast above is the result of what is probably the coolest class project ever.  The instructors[Michael Ham] and [Kenny Ham] gave their students a pile of junk and said “build something”. The goal was a “vehicle that could recharge itself”. In the pile were motorcycle tires, an old classroom seat, the front suspension from a VW bug, some old power drills, a solar panel, and a battery, amongst other bits and pieces.  What you see above was the result.  While it may not win any drag races any time soon, it was a fantastic class project that had the students thinking their way around many problems.

The videos on the project page show that this thing isn’t quite as sluggish as we would have expected for its size.

[via Make]

Filed Under: solar hacks, transportation hacks Tagged With:

How to properly fly with electronics

April 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Some electronics professionals have to fly relatively frequently. One such person, [Steve Hoefer] shares with us how to properly fly with your exposed wires and bits without getting nabbed by the TSA for suspicion of being a terrorist. The article is fairly in depth with tips on how to handle most situations including being pulled aside and put in a tiny room for questioning. Most of it boils down to the fact that you can’t expect the TSA agents to be experts in everything. They see stuff that is slightly out of the norm, they have to follow up. We’re not talking about pat-downs and body scanners here, we’re talking about circuit boards, duct tape, and battery packs.

One story [Steve] shares is especially humorous. He noted that the servos had been disconnected from one of his robots. He wonders, why disconnect them? If they were suspected of being an explosive, they shouldn’t have messed with them. If they weren’t… why did they un-plug them?

Filed Under: how-to, news, transportation hacks Tagged With: , ,

You're invited to sift through 100 Terabytes of data for NASA

April 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Most people we know had at least one phase where they dreamt of working for NASA. That dream may have faded for many of us, but it could suddenly be a real possibility again with a tournament NASA is holding. The goal is to sift through all of the data that they have collected; roughly 100 terabytes of pictures, telemetry data, top secret pictures of martian yeti, and models. All of this information was gathered over different missions, on different instruments, in different formats. It is a mess. Take this data and make it easily accessible to both scientists, and non-scientists. They want their information to be useful and compelling to the world.

The grand prize for your fantastic final result is $10,000 and the title of “Space Coder of the Galaxy 2012”.  I know I’d settle for a week at space camp.

Note: I just noticed the following bit:

And one talented high school winner will receive a special VIP invitation from NASA

I’m not sure if that means this is for high schoolers only, but I’m pretty sure it means a lot of them won’t identify with that space camp link above.

Filed Under: contests Tagged With: , , ,

Harnessing the electrical power of clams

April 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Yes, that is a clam. Yes researchers are using them as batteries. Yes, that quip about the matrix  and clam-Neo that is bubbling up into your temporal lobe is appropriate. While keeping a clam as “happy as a clam” might not necessitate a virtual world, they don’t really produce much electricity either. Researchers were able to siphon almost 29 millijoules over the course of an hour. This was enough to turn their electric motor one quarter of a turn.

Wether you find this kind of biological hacking ethical or not, you’ll probably agree that the following quote is, at least a tiny bit, creepy.

The researchers tried different ways to connect three clams at a time as a collective living battery. A serial circuit boosted the battery’s voltage (electric potential), whereas a parallel circuit increased the current (rate of charge flow) — but the overall electricity available often changed depending on each clam’s health.

Filed Under: news Tagged With: ,
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