Randall Olsen is a civilian employee of the US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) where he heads a team developing new technology for the Navy. In this video he takes us from his lab to a battleship to learn about his DANTE Antenna Technology that allows low-cost, high-speed directional ship-to-ship communication..

‘Inventors’ is a series of portrait videos by filmmaker and photographer David Friedman, chronicling the work of contemporary inventors from all walks of life. It offers rare glimpses into the inspiration for their creations, which range from the first digital camera and first video game console to a drive-able amphibious ice-fishing vehicle.

Check out this post from Pete Prodoehl’s RasterWeb that explores some of the food safety concerns for 3D printing + food. This is an area that I have been exploring extensively — and will be sharing some great techniques in the Adafruit Learning System in the near future — so I was happy to see other people covering this.

As a secret preview, I’ll let you know now that I am finding that rolling up your sleeves and learning mold making techniques from those who work in design kitchens is the best place to start to eliminate some of the difficult-to-guarrantee questions about using your 3D printer for making food.

Without further ado, Printing Violations III!

You loved Printing Violations, and you tolerated Printing Violations (Part II), so we’re back again with another episode of Printing Violations, this time looking more closely at the health issues surrounding 3D printed cookie cutters.

Licensing issues are one thing, but there is a safety concern with 3D printed cookie cutters. Here’s a look at some of the issues. (All assume you are using a home 3D printer like a MakerBot, RepRap, Printrbot, etc.)

Is ABS or PLA plastic filament food-safe?

The answers range from “probably not” to “maybe” in most cases. If you use natural filament it will be free of coloring agents, which is a step in the right direction, but unless you are specifically buying “food-safe filament” don’t expect it to be food-safe. (Keep in mind that “food-safe” is something that will be determined by local health departments, and will vary depending on where you live.)

Then there’s the printer itself, and the environment it runs in. My printer lives in a basement where I do other crazy things like run a drill press, spray glue and paint, and generally make a mess. Would you want your cookie cutter manufactured in such an environment? What has the filament come into contact with before it goes into the machine, and what else has been introduced into the extruder as far as foreign materials? If you’ve ever read up on what it takes to make food in your home and sell it commercially, you’ll have some idea of the restrictions involved. (Wait, we aren’t selling food, right? We’ll get to that, be patient!)

Can 3D printed items be treated to be safe(er?)

If you’ve ever looked at a 3D printed object, you may notice the ridges. Since it’s built up layer upon layer, there are spaces into which food could get stuck. Of course you can try to clean your 3D printed cookie cutter, but don’t put it in the dishwasher! For PLA prints, the heat will either melt it, or deform it, or do some other nasty thing to it. ABS may be better, but you will still need to heat it enough to sterilize it, and hope you can get the crevices clean. It’s been suggested that acetone vapor finishing might be helpful. Helpful enough? Not sure.

Of course you could use your printer to make a mold and then make a food-safe cutter out of another material, but that’s not really a 3D printed cookie cutter. You could also try to coat your printed piece with a food-safe coating, but that’s a lot more work.

So why does all this matter? Because right now, there are people printing cookie cutters and selling them, and there are also people 3D printing cookie cutters, making cookies with them, and selling the cookies.

Check out the rest of the discussion over at RasterWeb!

pighixxx has posted a slide-rule template for Voltage, Resistance, Current, and Power calculations!

CSA Astronaut Chris Hadfield performed a simple science experiment designed by grade 10 Lockview High School students Kendra Lemke and Meredith Faulkner. The students from Fall River, Nova Scotia won a national science contest held by the Canadian Space Agency with their experiment on surface tension in space using a wet washcloth.

A revised version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.

Chris Hadfield, he’s just the best.

Yesterday (May 11) would have been the 95th birthday of physicist, Nobel laureate, and total rock star Richard Feynman.

One of my favorite things ever is this video of Dr. Feynman talking about the wonderful experience of learning new things.

Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust – physics-math – 10 May 2013 – New Scientist.

For the first time, a commercially available quantum computer has been pitted against an ordinary PC – and the quantum device left the regular machine in the dust.

D-Wave, a company based in Burnaby, Canada, has been selling quantum computers since 2011, although critics expressed doubt that their chips were actually harnessing the spooky action of quantum mechanics. That’s because they use a non-mainstream method called adiabatic quantum computing.

Unlike classical bits, quantum bits, or qubits, can take the values 0 and 1 at the same time, theoretically offering much faster computing speed. To be truly quantum, the qubits must be linked via the quantum property of entanglement. That’s impossible to measure while the device is operating. But in March, two separate tests of the D-Wave device showed indirect evidence for entanglement.

Quantum bitcoin miner coming out soon

…it was one of the first books to feature photographs of the Moon’s surface, or so it seems! Astrophotography had its beginnings in the 1840s (with the first photograph of the Moon being a daguerreotype by John W. Draper that took over a half-an-hour to expose) but by the 1870s there was no photographic process in place to capture the details of the lunar surface that Nasmyth and Carpenter were observing. So this pair of enterprising gentlemen set forth and built a series of plaster models based on their observations, lit them with raking light and produced photographic illustrations for their book.

In the whole of their book there is only one photograph of the actual Moon, which was taken by Warren De la Rue (Plate III of the first edition, above).

This is not actually a photograph of the moon’s surface. It’s a photograph of a clay model based on Nasmyth and Carpenter’s observations and drawing through a telescope.

Controlled flight of a robotic insect

From the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard:

Inspired by the biology of a fly, with submillimeter-scale anatomy and two wafer-thin wings that flap at 120 times per second, robotic insects, or RoboBees, achieve vertical takeoff, hovering, and steering. The tiny robots flap their wings using piezoelectric actuators — strips of ceramic that expand and contract when an electric field is applied. Thin hinges of plastic embedded within a carbon fiber body frame serve as joints, and a delicately balanced control system commands the rotational motions in the flapping-wing robot, with each wing controlled independently in real-time. Applications of RoboBees could include distributed environmental monitoring, search-and-rescue operations, and assistance with crop pollination.

Read more:

ICTP scientists publish free downloadable book on low-cost 3D printing:

ICTP announces the release of a free, downloadable  book on a new technology that has the potential to revolutionize science,  education and sustainable development: three-dimensional (3D) printing.  The book, titled “Low-cost 3D Printing for Science, Education and Sustainable Development”, offers a practical guide to this rapidly evolving technology,  giving an overview of current research on the topic and its uses in science  education. It was compiled and edited by ICTP’s Science Dissemination Unit  (SDU) and can be downloaded free of cost from the website.

The affordable and easy-to-use technology is good news for developing  countries, where 3D printing could open up exciting opportunities for  research, education and humanitarian projects. As an institute dedicated  to promoting sustainable science in the developing world, ICTP is prepared  to advance the adoption of this technology in these regions. The book’s  editors -Enrique Canessa, Carlo Fonda and Marco Zennaro- want readers to  understand and explore the huge potential that 3D technology provides. 

The book is divided into four main sections: 

• a detailed view on the technology with information on how to create a 3D   printed object, the related open source hardware and software, the kits   available in the market today, and a glimpse at future projects;
• applications of 3D printing in scientific fields ranging from mathematics,   physics to archaeology, space science, and medicine;
• innovative ways for the technology to be used in education;
• a glimpse of the immense potential the low-cost 3D technology can have on sustainable development including plastic recycling.

 

Read more.

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!

You’re about to see the movie that holds the Guinness World Records™ record for the World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film. The ability to move single atoms — the smallest particles of any element in the universe — is crucial to IBM’s research in the field of atomic memory. But even nanophysicists need to have a little fun. In that spirit, IBM researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules (two atoms stacked on top of each other), all in pursuit of making a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times. A movie made with atoms.

American Graphite to develop 3D printing material, from 3ders.org:

American Graphite Technologies Inc. (OTCBB: AGIN), a mineral exploration and technology development company, announces Letter of Intent with a European institute for research and development collaboration for 3D printing.

American Graphite Technologies, in collaboration with the National Academy of Science of Ukraine; National Science Centre; Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology (“KIPT”), Kharkov, Ukraine, will research the properties of graphene contained matter as working material for 3D printing. More details will be released shortly.

Graphene is a nano-material directly derived from graphite. It is a single layer of carbon only one atom thick, and it is very cheap. Graphene has been described as the “miracle material” of the 21st Century. According to mechanical engineering professor James Hone, of Columbia University, graphene is strongest material ever measured, some 200 times stronger than structural steel.

In addition, Graphene is ultra thin, transparent, flexible and electrically conductive. Because of these remarkable properties Graphene can be used to make excellent transistors, gas sensors, lower cost solar cells and display screens in mobile devices etc.

Watch [above] the short film produced by the European Graphene-Flagship initiative, “introducing graphene”.

Read more.

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!

Announcing the 2013 White House Science Fair with Super Awesome Sylvia-

Visit WhiteHouse.Gov/ScienceFair on April 22nd to see live coverage, interviews and highlights from the 2013 White House Science fair

Super Awesome Sylvia!

Liquid Scaffolds From A 3-D Printer from Chemical & Engineering News. Via 3D Printing Industry.

Scientists trying to engineer tissue typically start with biodegradable solid or gel scaffolds and then seed living cells onto them. But having greater control over cell spreading and tissue growth would be a big plus for researchers.

A scaffold made of liquid compartments could provide that versatility. A method for fabricating such frameworks has been reported by a team led by Hagan Bayley of Oxford University (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1229495).

To create liquid scaffolds, the researchers custom-built a three-dimensional printer—a device that usually constructs solid objects layer by layer—to squirt tiny liquid droplets from its nozzles. When the machine prints lipid-coated water droplets onto a platform submerged in an oil bath, the 50-µm-diameter droplets adhere to one another. Oil-water repulsion partly drives the interaction.

“Instead of fusing to form a larger droplet, the tiny droplets ‘kiss’ and form a very thin bilayer interface” because of their lipid coatings, says former Oxford graduate student and the report’s lead author Gabriel Villar….

Read more.

San Francisco’s Exploratorium, which in 1969 rebooted the science museum concept into an immersive, participatory experience, is set to reopen in shiny new digs today at Pier 15. If you’ll be traveling to Maker Faire next month, you may want to pencil in a day for this. From a CNN article:

The culture of the Exploratorium has long been intertwined with the Maker Faire, the Bay Area festival that celebrates do-it-yourself projects. And its new shop, tinkering space and learning space expand on that maker spirit. The area where exhibits are tested and built with an impressive collection of large machinery is situated at the heart of the museum, now completely open so anyone can watch and chat up the staff and students at work.

Amazing magnetic putty via Colossal

Very glad to hear this is actually in the works! Via Universe Today:

Rumors have been leaking out for over a week, but now according to Alan Boyle at NBC News’ Cosmic Log, a senior Obama administration official has confirmed that $100 million is being sought for NASA’s budget request for the coming fiscal year for work to allow a robotic spaceship to capture a small asteroid and park it near the Moon for astronauts to explore. The spacecraft would capture a 500-ton, 7- meter (25-foot) asteroid in 2019. Then using an Orion space capsule, a crew of about four astronauts would station-keep with the space rock in 2021 to allow for EVAs for exploration. This plan would accelerate NASA’s deep space missions with Orion and prepare crews for going to Mars.

NBC news quoted the official — who spoke on condition of anonymity because there was no authorization to discuss the plan publicly — as saying the mission would “accomplish the president’s challenge of sending humans to visit an asteroid by 2025 in a more cost-effective and potentially quicker time frame than under other scenarios.”

A week ago, Aviation Week reported that NASA was considering this asteroid mission, which was proposed by the Keck Institute for Space Studies last year. Keck’s proposal had a price tag of $2.6 billion, but no cost estimate for the space agency’s version has yet been released.

Then on April 5, the Associated Press quoted U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida, Nelson, chairman of the Senate science and space subcommittee, that President Obama is putting $100 million in planning money for the accelerated asteroid mission in the 2014 budget that comes out next week. The money would be used to find the right small asteroid.

“It really is a clever concept,” AP quoted Nelson said in a press conference in Orlando. “Go find your ideal candidate for an asteroid. Go get it robotically and bring it back.”

This would be the first time ever an object in space of this size would be manipulated in such a manner.

A new website: distancetomars.com — that will help you visualize the voyage from the Earth to the red planet. Neat idea!

Prince Rupert’s Drop on Smarter Every Day via Colossal

(image by Brendan Monroe via Nature)

An eye-opening piece in Nature about the cost of science publishing:

Michael Eisen doesn’t hold back when invited to vent. “It’s still ludicrous how much it costs to publish research — let alone what we pay,” he declares. The biggest travesty, he says, is that the scientific community carries out peer review — a major part of scholarly publishing — for free, yet subscription-journal publishers charge billions of dollars per year, all told, for scientists to read the final product. “It’s a ridiculous transaction,” he says.

Eisen, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that scientists can get much better value by publishing in open-access journals, which make articles free for everyone to read and which recoup their costs by charging authors or funders. Among the best-known examples are journals published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which Eisen co-founded in 2000. “The costs of research publishing can be much lower than people think,” agrees Peter Binfield, co-founder of one of the newest open-access journals, PeerJ, and formerly a publisher at PLoS.

But publishers of subscription journals insist that such views are misguided — born of a failure to appreciate the value they add to the papers they publish, and to the research community as a whole. They say that their commercial operations are in fact quite efficient, so that if a switch to open-access publishing led scientists to drive down fees by choosing cheaper journals, it would undermine important values such as editorial quality.

…

Data from the consulting firm Outsell in Burlingame, California, suggest that the science-publishing industry generated $9.4 billion in revenue in 2011 and published around 1.8 million English-language articles — an average revenue per article of roughly $5,000. Analysts estimate profit margins at 20–30% for the industry, so the average cost to the publisher of producing an article is likely to be around $3,500–4,000.

Most open-access publishers charge fees that are much lower than the industry’s average revenue, although there is a wide scatter between journals. The largest open-access publishers — BioMed Central and PLoS — charge $1,350–2,250 to publish peer-reviewed articles in many of their journals, although their most selective offerings charge $2,700–2,900. In a survey published last year2, economists Bo-Christer Björk of the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki and David Solomon of Michigan State University in East Lansing looked at 100,697 articles published in 1,370 fee-charging open-access journals active in 2010 (about 40% of the fully open-access articles in that year), and found that charges ranged from $8 to $3,900. Higher charges tend to be found in ‘hybrid’ journals, in which publishers offer to make individual articles free in a publication that is otherwise paywalled (see ‘Price of prestige’). Outsell estimates that the average per-article charge for open-access publishers in 2011 was $660.

The cosmic microwave background.

This is the raw data from the Planck mission of the intensity fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. At the highest resolution it includes 50 million pixels of information.

For a selection of scientific papers on the subject see this paperscape graph. For some commentary on Planck’s results, try the blog entries here,here or here. See the Planck Chromoscope for flat 2D maps.

You can use your mouse to control the view: click-drag will change the latitude/longitude, double click zooms in, and mouse scroll-wheel zooms in and out.

The following key bindings are also available: left, right, up, down (scroll the view), +, – (zoom), r (reset view).

The raw data is tiled over a sphere using this scheme. WebGL and thethree.js library are used for rendering.

Today would be the 100th birthday of legendary Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős. Among his many accomplishments, Erdős is perhaps best known for being the most published mathematician of all time (1500+ papers), and his extensive collaborations with other mathematicians, which is reflected in the establishment of the Erdős number.

Via WP:

[He] was an influential mathematician, who spent a large portion of his later life living out of a suitcase and writing papers with those of his colleagues willing to give him room and board.[1] He published more papers during his life (at least 1,525[2]) than any other mathematician in history.[1]

The idea of the Erdős number was created by the mathematician’s friends as a humorous tribute to his enormous output as one of the most prolific modern writers of mathematical papers. The Erdős number has become well known in scientific circles as a tongue-in-cheek measurement of mathematical prominence.

Wired Space Photo of the Day @ Wired Science.

This exceptional image of the Horsehead nebula was taken at the National Science Foundation’s 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak with the NOAO Mosaic CCD camera. Located in the constellation of Orion, the Hunter, the Horsehead is part of a dense cloud of gas in front of an active star-forming nebula known as IC434. The nebulosity of the Horsehead is believed to be excited by the bright star Sigma Orionis, which is located above the top of the image. Just off the left side of the image is the bright star Zeta Orionis, which is the easternmost of the three stars that form Orion’s belt. Zeta Orionis is a foreground star, and is not related to the nebula.

Back in the fall of 2008, the Large Hadron Collider experienced a setback when a section of the liquid helium coolant exploded. Aside from the damage caused by the explosion, there was damage to the electrical system. The lack of coolant resulted in a loss of superconductivity, which caused the temperature of the conductors to rise to damaging levels — the conductors were still carrying thousands of amps of current, but their resistance had increased by several orders of magnitude. Ohm, the humanity!

To help prevent such an occurrence in the future, the LHC team has begun installing special shunts, which will help lower the resistance of the conductors at non-cryo temperatures, in order to prevent similar damage from happening again.

On 19 September 2008, during powering tests on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a fault occurred in a superconducting interconnection between two magnets – a dipole and a quadrupole – resulting in mechanical damage and release of helium from the magnet cold mass into the tunnel. Proper safety procedures were in force, the safety systems performed as expected, and no-one was put at risk. But the fault did delay work on the LHC by six months.

After the incident, CERN engineers decided that such interconnections should be upgraded to avoid similar electrical faults in future. As a precaution, beams in the LHC were accelerated below the LHC’s design limit for the first three years of running. Upgrading the interconnections will be one of the main activities at the LHC during its two-year shutdown, allowing the LHC to run at 7 TeV per beam when it starts up again.

There are 10,000 “splices” – superconducting connections between magnets – on the LHC. Each splice carries 13,000 amps.

In the video above, Jean-Phillipe Tock of the Technology department explains how, over the next 18 months, technicians will add an additional piece – a “shunt” – to each splice. The shunt is a low-resistance connection that forms an alternative path for a portion of the current in the event that the splice loses its superconducting state. A total of 27,000 shunts will be installed in the 27-kilometre accelerator.

[vid link]

Whoa. Via Science Friday:

Reporting in the journal Nature Physics, William Irvine and Dustin Kleckner, physicists at the University of Chicago, describe the knotted fluid vortex they created in the lab — a scientific first, they say. The knots resemble smoke rings — except these are made of water, and they’re shaped like pretzels, not donuts. Understanding knottiness has extra-large applications, including untangling dynamics of the sun.

A beautiful short film about the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) radiotelescope in Chile. Directed by Jonathan de Villiers. Part 2 can be found at nowness.com.

[via UT]

Waves are part of the natural world as well as our models of it. Brusspup has tied together ideas about sound waves, material science, and cameras to produce these incredible results.

From Colossal:

What!? How is this even possible? Because science, my friends. Brusspup’s (previously) latest video explores what happens when a stream of water is exposed to an audio speaker producing a loud 24hz sine wave. If I understand correctly the camera frame rate has been adjusted to the match the vibration of the air (so, 24fps) thus creating … magic zigzagging water. Or something. Here’s a little more detail:

Run the rubber hose down past the speaker so that the hose touches the speaker. Leave about 1 or 2 inches of the hose hanging past the bottom of the speaker. Secure the hose to the speaker with tape or whatever works best for you. The goal is to make sure the hose is touching the actual speaker so that when the speaker produces sound (vibrates) it will vibrate the hose.

Set up your camera and switch it to 24 fps. The higher the shutter speed the better the results. But also keep in the mind that the higher your shutter speed, the more light you need. Run an audio cable from your computer to the speaker. Set your tone generating software to 24hz and hit play. Turn on the water. Now look through the camera and watch the magic begin. If you want the water to look like it’s moving backward set the frequency to 23hz. If you want to look like it’s moving forward in slow motion set it to 25hz.

Brusspup did a similar experiment last year where it looked as if the water was flowing in reverse. Can somebody please make a water fountain that does this or would we all be deaf?

Read more.

Ladyada gave me some ITO (indium tin oxide)-coated plastic and glass samples to play with, so I affixed some LEDs to this transparent conductive material! Watch the video on YouTube (please subscribe)!

VarStiff hard/soft material via Core77:

A Spanish company called Tecnalia has developed a new type of fabric that can be made to go from soft to hard and back again. Called VarStiff, the material’s default state is soft, like regular fabric; but attaching a vacuum to an embedded valve and sucking all of the air out turns the material rigid, “[achieving] hardness equivalent to that of a conventional plastic.” To get it soft again, re-introduce air.

Welcome to the fascinating world of Eulerian Video Magnification and other motion magnification techniques currently being explored at MIT.

From the NYTimes:

A 30-second video of a newborn baby shows the infant silently snoozing in its crib, his breathing barely perceptible. But when the video is run through an algorithm that can amplify both movement and color, the baby’s face blinks crimson with each tiny heartbeat.

The amplification process is called Eulerian Video Magnification, and is the brainchild of a team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

The team originally developed the program to monitor neonatal babies without making physical contact. But they quickly learned that the algorithm can be applied to other videos to reveal changes imperceptible to the naked eye. Prof. William T. Freeman, a leader on the team, imagines its use in search and rescue, so that rescuers could tell from a distance if someone trapped on a ledge, say, is still breathing.

“Once we amplify these small motions, there’s like a whole new world you can look at,” he said.

The system works by homing in on specific pixels in a video over the course of time. Frame-by-frame, the program identifies minute changes in color and then amplifies them up to 100 times, turning, say, a subtle shift toward pink to a bright crimson. The scientists who developed it believe it could also have applications in industries like manufacturing and oil exploration. For example, a factory technician could film a machine to check for small movements in bolts that might indicate an impending breakdown. In one video presented by the scientists, a stationary crane sits on a construction site, so still it could be a photograph. But once run through the program, the crane appears to sway precariously in the wind, perhaps tipping workers off to a potential hazard.

It is important to note that the crane does not actually move as much as the video seems to show. It is the process of motion amplification that gives the crane its movement.

Read more.

Check out this excellent flow sensor project from the Adafruit Forums:

I have a problem. When I look at my brewery I think that if it is working, then it doesn’t have enough features. Certain parts of the brewing process suggest specific liquid flow rates, but without instantaneous feedback, how can anyone ever really judge if they’re doing it right? It seemed that commercial flow meters are complete garbage or are insanely expensive. Luckily, Adafruit had my back with an inexpensive flow sensor.

I slapped a couple quick disconnects on it, and replaced the screws that held it together with 3/4″ #4 brass wood screws to allow it to be mounted to a nice enclosure.

The rest of the parts were maybe $15-20, but I had them sitting around from my other projects. I need to get a 9V battery clip. Soldering wires onto a 9V battery because you’re more excited about getting it working than driving to Radio Shack is surprisingly difficult.

The PCB is custom made from OSH Park and drives the LCD, PWM backlight and contrast, and of course counts the sensor pulses. I went a slightly different way than the example sketch does it, because I found that the resolution at low flow rates was too coarse. I use Timer1 set to 62.5Khz and use the input capture interrupt to store the elapsed ticks between pulses.

The sensor works great, but is quite a bit off spec (450 pulses per liter) at flow rates less than 4 lpm. I calibrated by running hundreds of liters of water through it and creating some calibration points that I can LERP between. Flow rate accuracy now pretty tight, off by a couple percent. Careful calibration can take this sensor down below its minimum spec’ed flow rate, down to about 0.7 lpm, but the pulses-per-liter count at that rate changes dramatically.

Here’s some pictures of the device in action on the brewery, where it just snaps on to the existing pump infrastructure. Using sleep modes between pulses means the current draw is relatively low and the 9V battery should last roughly 30 hours in use….

Read more.

Perhaps I am susceptible to link-baiting, but I kept the title in place above from this fun 3ders.org article: lunar base + giant NASA spider robot = I gotta read more! And I was not disappointed. NASA is starting to become everything I dreamed it might be when I played with LEGO space vehicles in my backyard as a child. AWESOME:

Last month, the European Space Agency (ESA) was teaming up with its industrial partner renowned architects Foster + Partners to test the feasibility of 3D printing using lunar soil and to build a lunar base.

It seems that NASA has also got a similar idea: using existing resources on the moon to build those structures. Space architects Tomas Rousek, Katarina Eriksson and Dr. Ondrej Doule have unveiled their vision for a lunar module which shows the potential of 3D printing technology from NASA.

Both bases would be located near the Shackleton crater, close to the Moon’s south pole, where sunlight (and thus solar energy) is nearly constant, and both use lunar dust as basic building material. But NASA’s idea is slightly different.

Due to the unique properties of the lunar soil and the absence of anatmosphere, NASA’s modules would be constructed from lunar soil by microwave sintering and contour crafting making use of NASA JPL robotics system. The tech is called SinterHab….

Read more.

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!

Check out this video and then head over to the BBC coverage of an interesting project from TED this year: 3D printing technology to introduce self-assembly into the logic of the materials themselves — thus adding the dimension of time!

Many are only just getting their heads around the idea of 3D printing but scientists at MIT are already working on an upgrade: 4D printing.

At the TED conference in Los Angeles, architect and computer scientist Skylar Tibbits showed how the process allows objects to self-assemble.

It could be used to install objects in hard-to-reach places such as underground water pipes, he suggested.

It might also herald an age of self-assembling furniture, said experts.

Read more.

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!

Fascinating article about the physics of lava formations @ Nervous System:

Lava is the molten rock expelled by a volcano during an eruption. Lava flows can have very different properties based on their chemical composition, temperature, eruption rate, crystal content, and bubble content. The current lava flow in Hawaii is an effusive flow of basalt with low viscosity and high temperature. It flows quickly and smoothly, leaving glassy rippled rock in its wake. Geologists call this type of flow pahoehoe, a Hawaiian name that equates the lava forms to swirling water (“hoe” = to paddle). This is an apt name as the lava rock is festooned with incredible patterns of contorted wrinkles, ripples, and folds. What causes these forms?

When lava flows, the outside layer quickly cools forming an exterior crust. In fact, many of the lava patterns we found were quite thin and hollow inside where the lava had subsequently evacuated after the structures were formed. This cooled layer is significantly more viscous than the lava below acting like a viscous sheet. Folds begin to form when the flow compresses due to the slowing of the flow front. This compression could be caused by hitting an obstruction or entering a narrow channel. These folds form in the span of seconds to minutes.

Twice as good as a single lunar rainbow, which is already pretty good!

From the Lunar Science page at Nasa:

Dale Cruikshank took this 20 second exposure at F4 with a 28 mm lens from Kaanapali, Maui at ~9:30 PM on Feb. 26, 2013. Nothing inspires like a LUNAR DOUBLE rainbow!

A moonbow (also known as a lunar rainbow, white rainbow, lunar bow, or space rainbow) is a rainbow produced by light reflected off the surface of the moon (rather than from direct sunlight) refracting off of moisture in the air. Moonbows are relatively faint, due to the smaller amount of light reflected from the surface of the moon. They are always in the opposite part of the sky from the moon.

Because the light is usually too faint to excite the cone color receptors in human eyes, it is difficult for the human eye to discern colors in a moonbow. As a result, they often appear to be white. However, the colors in a moonbow do appear in long exposure photographs.

From New Scientist:

Billionaire internet investor Yuri Milner says he launched his $3 million science prizes to create heroes for the next generation

What is the goal of the new prizes?
Scientists are under-represented as heroes in our society. We intend to change that. This is not an objective in itself; it will in turn encourage younger people to go into science and also help to increase funding. The more attention you attract to science, the better off everybody will be.

Why do you think famous scientists are key to inspiring the next generation?
To inspire young people to go into science you need to show them the heroes of the present. People look at Usain Bolt and they go into running. You need role models to attract young talent. That is not emphasised in science. How many scientists are household names?

You launched physics prizes last year. Why did you create life sciences prizes as well?
Fundamental physics is at the forefront of answering big questions; I don’t think there is any bigger question than the universe. The next set of big questions is about life – evolution, disease, genetics, longevity and so on. So the life sciences are a natural second step.

How did you decide on $3 million?
There is no magic in this number, but it emphasises the importance of these people in society: not only Wall Street traders should be making millions. That said, I don’t think scientists are inspired by money. It’s not so much about the $3 million – though that’s not going to hurt. It is about showcasing the scientists. Millions of lives are saved every year by what these people are discovering, yet nobody knows who they are.

As much as I tend to scoff at “throw money at it” solutions to cultural problems, I believe this idea might have some merit.

While (ideologically, at least) scientific prestige is based on making contributions of scientific value, wider cultural prestige in our society is tied, at least in part, to personal wealth. This may redress the imbalance a bit. It’s true that there are already a number of wealthy scientists, doctors, inventors, etc., but they’re still uncommon enough to be considered somewhat anomalous.

Imagine a leisure class of scientists* with enough money to fund their own research, beyond boundary conditions of profitability created by someone else.

*you don’t have to imagine it, actually — for a long time, science was the hobby of the noblesse. The Royal Society of London was basically a social club for rich people who liked to do science for fun.

Mechanical Buddhas by Wang Zi Won via Colossal

The Buckminster Fuller Institute has announced a call for proposals for their 2013 Challenge.

Each year, the Buckminster Fuller Institute awards $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a solution that has significant potential to solve one of humanity’s most pressing problems. This prize program is a call to the world’s artists, scientists, designers, architects, engineers, students, and entrepreneurs committed to playing a transformative role in addressing the biggest issues we face today.

Winning the Buckminster Fuller Challenge requires more than inserting a great stand-alone innovation into a complex ‘problem space’. We are looking for holistic strategies that demonstrate a clear grasp of ‘the big picture’, focused on a well-defined need of critical importance. If for example, your solution emphasizes a new design, material, process, service, tool, technology, or any combination, it is essential that it be part of an integrated strategy that incorporates key social, environmental, and economic factors. We are seeking visions that put forth what Fuller called a preferred state model – one that aims to design a set of initial conditions from inception in order to create over time, the most desirable, sustainable outcome. We are seeking solutions that embody what Fuller referred to as the trimtab principle – demonstrating that a relatively small initiative inserted into a system at the right time and place can achieve maximum leverage for advantageous change.

Entries can span the spectrum of scale – from macrostrategies restoring and maintaining ecosystems necessary for life on earth to thrive, to community-based ventures that have global relevance. Entries can also span the spectrum of development stage – from well formulated concept, to proof-of-concept, to proven track record. Competence and commitment of the team behind the idea is more important.

You can read more about the RFP here, and the Challenge here.

From National Geographic:

Scientists have taken the first ever snapshot of an atom’s shadow—the smallest ever photographed using visible light. The imaging technique could have big implications for genetic research and cryptography, researchers say.

The pioneering shutterbugs used an electrical field to suspend a charged atom, or ion, of the element ytterbium in a vacuum chamber. They then shot a laser beam—about a thousand times wider than the atom—at the ytterbium.

The ytterbium atom absorbed a tiny portion of the light, and the resulting shadow was magnified by a lens attached to a microscope, then recorded via a digital camera sensor.

The team used ytterbium because they knew they could create lasers of the right color to be strongly absorbed by the element.

NASA – NuSTAR Media Teleconference & live video.

NASA is hosting a news teleconference at 10 a.m. PST (1 p.m. EST), Wednesday, Feb. 27, to announce black hole observations from its newest X-ray telescope, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray telescope.

The Mechatronics Guy decided to take along a geiger counter while flying and manually log data to see the results.

I recently flew interstate for work and decided to do a bit of science on the way. Taking along my handy-dandy geiger counter (which in addition to having a 10yr battery is also blessed by the FCC for flight use), a notebook and a pen, I sketched down the raw counts from the meter every minute of the flight.

Why did I do this? Well, if you haven’t noticed, the universe is trying to kill us. Cosmic radiation comes in from space, but is attenuated from earth’s atmosphere. When you start moving outside the earth’s atomosphere, the level goes up. Not quite enough to be worrisome, but pretty interesting if you happen to be able to monitor it.

Detect particles and/or make a cool random number generator with this handsome Geiger counter kit. This easy-to-make pack of parts turns a simple Geiger-Muller tube (included) into a portable blink, beeping radiation detector. You can also connect an FTDI friend to the header, to get serial output for datalogging on your computer.  Also be sure to check out our glow-in-the-dark radiation skill badge!

In Stock and Shipping Now!

Check out these fascinating algae-powered public lamps, sent to us as a blogtip sent in from Tony Sherwood: a reminder that solutions to one problem often emerge from an understanding of the fuel, product, and waste from complementary processes.

Here’s a post about these lamps with some links to supplementary articles from Treehugger.com:

French biochemist and Shamengo pioneer Pierre Calleja has invented this impressive streetlight that is powered by algae which absorbs CO2 from the air. We have featured algae-powered lamps before but this one takes out 1 ton (!) of CO2 per year. This is as much CO2 as a tree absorbs on average during its entire life.

It seems to me that this is a pretty amazing idea that could really work and clean the air pollution from urban areas (like parking lots, tested in the video above) and at the same time look good. That said, reducing is still better than restoring, but in the meantime- let’s get this lamp working!

Read more.

Fascinating post about using a RasPi to explore Diffusion MRI analysis, shared over at RaspberryPi.org:

I wanted to try the same sort of analysis that a researcher working in my field might want to use. The simplest and most widely used technique in Diffusion MRI is called Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI). The brain is partly made up of a thing called white matter, which is a lot like cabling that connects various bits of it together. DTI can tell us which way the cables are pointing at each point along their length. We can use the information it gives us to make new images which are more useful than the originals.

To my great delight, the Raspi ran a DTI analysis in a little over 5 minutes and produced some really nice images. All these images were generated and displayed by the Raspi. (Liz: you can enlarge all these images by clicking on them.) I used scrot for screen captures, so aside from a little cropping this all is pure Pi….

Read more.

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.

We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!

How Brainless Slime Molds Redefine Intelligence @ Scientific American.

Inside laboratories slime molds have effectively re-created Tokyo’s railway network in miniature as well as the highways of Canada, the U.K. and Spain. When researchers placed oat flakes or other bits of food in the same positions as big cities and urban areas, slime molds first engulfed the entirety of the edible maps. Within a matter of days, however, the protists thinned themselves away, leaving behind interconnected branches of slime that linked the pieces of food in almost exactly the same way that man-made roads and rail lines connect major hubs in Tokyo, Europe and Canada.

In other words, the single-celled brainless amoebae did not grow living branches between pieces of food in a random manner; rather, they behaved like a team of human engineers, growing the most efficient networks possible.

From Phys.Org.

The latest fish tag design is streamlined and looks different from earlier tag designs.
CSIRO scientists are using 3D printing to build a new generation of hi-tech fish tags made of titanium. The aim is to use the tags to track big fish such as marlin, tuna, swordfish, trevally and sharks for longer periods.

CSIRO is printing the tags at its 3D printing facility, Lab 22, in Melbourne. The tags are printed overnight and then shipped to Tasmania where marine scientists are trialing them.

Tags are made of titanium for several reasons: the metal is strong, resists the salty corrosiveness of the marine environment, and is biocompatible (non-toxic to living tissues).

One of the advantages of 3D printing is that it enables rapid manufacture of multiple design variations which can then be tested simultaneously. “Using our Arcam 3D printing machine, we’ve been able to re-design and make a series of modified tags within a week,” says John Barnes, who leads CSIRO’s research in titanium technologies.

“When our marine science colleagues asked us to help build a better fish tag, we were able to send them new prototypes before their next trip to sea,” he adds.

CSIRO’s 3D printing facility prints metal items layer by layer out of fused metal powder. Had the scientists been using conventional tags which are machined out of metal blocks, it would have taken a couple of months to design, manufacture and receive the new designs for testing.

“Our early trials showed that the textured surface worked well in improving retention of the tag, but we need to fine-tune the design of the tag tip to make sure that it pierces the fish skin as easily as possible,” says John.

“The fast turnaround speeds up the design process – it’s very easy to incorporate amendments to designs. 3D printing enables very fast testing of new product designs, which why it’s so attractive to manufacturers wanting to trial new products.”

Read more.

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!

Wow. I love this amazing image by Alan Friedman, titled ‘Winter Sun’.

A hibernation project… a warm weather sun set aside to work on during the cold, sunless days of January. Captured June 10, 2012, completed today.

[via colossal]

Fun video from Numberphile and Dr. Tony Padilla about the recently discovered largest prime number.