Chemistry

Make: Projects – Water Bath Thermostat

Make: Projects – Water Bath Thermostat

This project was inspired by “Cooking for Geeks” author Jeff Potter’s quick DIY sous-vide hack. My plan, initially, was to just hack the controller into an enclosure with an A/C outlet, the idea being that you could just plug any heater you wanted into the outlet. Looking around for cheap temperature controllers, however, I happened across the STC-1000 on eBay for $25. It’s not PID, but it has proven to be plenty accurate enough for almost any practical purpose. And since the STC-1000 has both heating and cooling functions built-in, the logical next step seemed to be to split a single A/C outlet so that you could plug a heater or a cooler (or both) into it and use it for all kinds of stuff.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan40
Detect Anything With a Personal Glucose Meter

Detect Anything With a Personal Glucose Meter

Here’s an extremely innovative idea from Yi Lu and Yu Xiang at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, just published in Nature Chemistry. Medical demand for home blood glucose monitoring equipment has led to the development of inexpensive, accurate, and widely available electronic instruments that can measure glucose levels in blood. Some modern personal glucose meters, or PGMs, cost as little as $10.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan10
Plastic from Fish Scales

Plastic from Fish Scales

Erik de Laurens recently graduated from the Royal College of Art. As part of his graduate exhibition, Erik presented his project The Fish Feast. He was experimenting with uses for fish scales (of which the commercial fishing industry discards tons annually) and discovered he could create a useful plasticby forming the cleaned scales under heat and pressure.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan12

Making EL Wire Change Color

It’s not a dramatic color shift, but it turns out you can control the hue of EL wire over a narrow range by varying the frequency of the resonating driver circuit. dcroy (upper video) did it back in February using a 555, and Paul Stoffregen (lower video) unknowingly repeated the work recently, having noticed that a single fixed-frequency driver produced slightly different colors in two different lengths of wire.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan4
Hobby Micro Distilling

Hobby Micro Distilling

Producing high-proof alcohol is possible because of two wonderful scientific truths. The first is that yeast ferments sugar; that is, the tiny yeast fungi feed on sugar and convert it carbon dioxide and ethyl alcohol. The second is that alcohol and water boil at two different temperatures.

Continue Reading Bill Gurstelle51