How to Find Dry Ice for Your Projects

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Bubble Wok Whether you’re floating bubbles on carbon dioxide, making a cloud chamber or wanting to keep the contents of your freezer frozen during a power outage, you are going to need dry ice. We’ve gotten a lot of questions about where to get dry ice. We found our local dealer by stumbling on a flyer at the grocery store, which isn’t the most reliable method. Luckily, we’ve found a fantastic resource for you (if you’re in the US): Airgas has a dry ice retailer locator on their website.

We have had mixed luck just showing up at the store (and one long dry ice dry spell during the period after a fire at the local plant) so we recommend calling ahead to check availability. Conveniently, Airgas includes phone numbers in their retailer listings.

Here’s your obligatory warning: dry ice is cold. Dangerously cold. Don’t allow prolonged (and by prolonged, we mean anything more than momentary) contact with skin. We don’t recommend using a hard plastic cooler for transporting dry ice as the very low temperature can make it brittle and prone to cracking. A styrofoam cooler is a better option, but a nice thick towel will do nicely for insulation in transit as well.

For an added bonus, here’s the Airgas page of Cool Uses for Dry Ice. You’ve got to love an industrial supplier that has a recipe for “Witch’s Brew” on their website!

[Related: Floating Bubbles on CO2, AirGas, Retailer Locator, Cool Uses ]

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Reminder: Intro microcontroller class tomorrow (Saturday)

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Reminder: This Saturday, April 21, I’ll be giving a seminar at TechShop that’s an introduction to microcontrollers, called Choosing a Microcontroller. This is designed to be an introduction to the capabilities and variety of single-chip computers, as well how to actually pick one for a given application. It’s easy to get overwhelmed looking at the variety of range of micros, from four-bit micros that have a 4-bit wide data path — and actually cost four bits— to AVRs and PICs, basic stamps and Arduinos, to 32-bit gorillas with names like ARM, Blackfin, and Coldfire. So, we’ll try and cut through the fog and help you figure out where to get started.

If you’ve heard people getting excited about or doing cool things with microcontrollers and want to learn more, this might be a great introduction to the field.
Sign up for this and other TechShop classes here!

[Related: EvilMadScientist Microcontroller Projects]

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Resources for choosing a microcontroller

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ATtiny2313 I’ve put together a short list (after the jump) of some potentially useful resources that may be of help in choosing a microcontroller for your project, or just getting started with microcontrollers in general. I plan to add to this list from time to time. If you have other suggested resources to add to the list, please feel free to leave them in the comments here– good suggestions may be incorporated into future revisions of the list.

Continue reading Resources for choosing a microcontroller →

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Cashew folktale

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Yesterday we received an anonymous comment on our cashew story with a Sri Lankan folktale about the cashew. If this is your comment, thanks for sharing your story– Let us know who you are and we’ll give you credit!

Here is the story:

My mother told me a story (From Sri Lanka) about why the Cashew fruit has its seed on the outside.

Apparently, as God was creating the world he was approached by the Devil, who was upset that he had not been allowed to make something. So, in an act of kindness, God asked the Devil to make a fruit.

The Devil went to work and formed what we now know as the Cashew fruit. He took it to God and said, “See? I can make something just as good as your creations.”

On looking it over, God asked, “But where is the seed?”

The Devil, realising his mistake, just muttered, “Oh, I’ll stick it here.” And with that, placed the seed on the bottom of the fruit.

And there you have it.

[Related: Cashews: the nut you can’t buy in a shell]

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Organizing a collection using flickr

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The collection, all together

Flickr is a great tool for organizing a collection. You can upload your photos and apply titles, tags and descriptions, which is a sneaky way of cramming a lot of indexed data into an invisible database. (You probably do that already, so why not reap the benefits?) The great thing about it is that you can use the indexing metadata to easily search and sort your collection by a variety of criteria. Naturally, because it’s flickr, you can also share information about your collection as well as visually share the collection itself.

An example is my super ball collection, twenty years in the making, containing 325 items (not including jacks) which I photographed and organized using flickr.

Below is an 18 x 18 mosaic of 324 pictures of the items in my collection of super balls (and closely related objects), ranging from the size of a kumquat to the size of a pomelo. Read on to learn about some of the tricks and tools (such as making mosaics) that you can use for your collections.

All my superballs in one mosaic
Continue reading Organizing a collection using flickr →

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A $20 hackable extruder for your artbot or 3D printer

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Fabric painter kit from craft store

Fused deposition machines are an interesting class of rapid prototyping and art robots, capable of extruding paint onto a canvas or extruding to build up complex, three-dimensional objects one layer at a time. Naturally, one of the challenging parts of designing machines like these is designing and building a system for dispensing the printing medium. So, imagine how surprised we were when we were walking through the aisles of our local Michaels craft store and saw a pre-built extruder on the shelf for $20!
Naturally, we picked one up because an extruder head might make a nice accessory for our own three dimensional printer.

So, what is it? It’s an inexpensive kit that can be used for developing your 2D or 3D printer extruder with an air-powered delivery system. For the price you can get a small air pump, tubing, syringes, tips, and dispenser. The components are simple and easily hackable, and it looks like a good set of tools for starting to build a simple extruder head for an art bot of some sort.

Quite mysteriously, this kit is not actually advertised as an arbitrary material extruder kit, but rather as “the ultimate fabric painter.” This is very strange because not only does the kit not include any fabric paint, but it’s not obvious that there’s any advantage whatsoever to painting fabric with this method. (Actually, if the picture on the front of the box is any indication, there may even be disadvantages!)
Continue reading A $20 hackable extruder for your artbot or 3D printer →

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Glenn’s Mosaic Table

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Mosaic table
Glenn made this very awesome mosaic table, influenced by our Mixed-Media Mosaic Dining Table. In the table are neatly broken tiles, marbles, dice, broken tourist-trap commemorative plate shards, and other interesting goodies. =)
Mosaic table close-upHere’s a close up of some of the materials he used. There are more pictures in his project set on flickr.

PS: Glenn was kind enough to add these photos to the Evil Mad Science Auxiliary flickr photo pool. If you’ve got pictures that are (at least marginally) related to posts and projects on evilmadscientist, add them to that group, and they’ll appear now and then in the Evil Mad Science Auxiliary flickr photo badge on the right hand side of this page.

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Duplex cookie games

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Cookie Checkers, continued
Duplex cookies bring a whole new level of literalness to the phrase “playing with your food.” These two-toned sandwich cookies beg to be used for board games such as Othello and checkers (or Go, if you have a lot of cookies). All you need are cookies, a large piece of paper and a pen.

We made a stop-motion video of a few minutes of playing games with the cookies, Check it out on youtube or watch it embedded here:

 


 

Continue reading Duplex cookie games →

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Meringue peeps round-up

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Finished peep Last week we showed you how to make your own Meringue Chicks.

Since then, a few brave souls have tried it out and posted pictures of their own homemade Pseudo-Peeps.  You can see some photos at
Assorted Notions and in the Recipe Maven community, who also show off some interesting meringue bunnies. Speaking of assorted meringue animals, we might have to make these silly snails next time.

It’s fairly off-topic, but while browsing pictures of Peeps on flickr this week, we also came across this reminder (NSFPL – not safe for peep lovers) of what’s in regular old peeps. We’ll stick to meringue, thanks.

[Related @ evilmadscientist: Pretzel Snails, Play with your food]

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