Archive for June, 2010

Carbonated Fruit Salad

Posted by Matthew Tavares on June 22, 2010
Miscellaneous Mischief / No Comments

I have been putting together the necessary parts for making carbonated fruit salad. It is exactly what it sounds like. A friend of mine named Victor White turned me on to this idea a couple years back. You make a pressure chamber out of large, pressure rated PVC tubing. Keep in mind that it will have to fit into the refrigerator. Then you add all sorts of fruit. Things with skins like key limes and oranges are fun if you leave the skins on. They tend to explode a bit when you bite into them. You then have two options to carbonate it. You can either just pressurize it with a tank of CO2 or add dry ice. Either way, you want the tank to maintain around 3/4 of the maximal operating pressure of the PVC and PVC fittings you are using. Always let any PVC cement and primer completely set before pressure testing the chamber. If you are using dry ice you HAVE to set up a regulator so it will dump any CO2 beyond your PVC’s limits or you are potentially making a PVC shrapnel bomb with a fruity after math. An emergency pressure relief valve is a good idea as well for good measure. If all goes well, you will have a deliciously fizzy fruit salad after a night in the fridge. I will put up pictures of my setup soon.

As always, do all of this at your own risk. Your safety is your responsibility, not mine.

TurtleBot

Posted by Matthew Tavares on June 04, 2010
Misc Bots, TurtleBot / No Comments
The Robot

Turtle Bot

A while back a friend of mine donated an old and broken Friendly Robotics lawn mower to my garage. It sat in my garage for a while until recently. I recently pulled a Frankenstein on it and replaced it’s gut’s with a few parts I had lying around. I gave it two victor 883 speed controllers, an SSC-32 board for controlling the victors, an Xbee module for communicating with the ssc-32 wirelessly from a computer, the essential LED lights, and a Car Battery to run it all. I control it all with a Linux laptop that also has a Xbee module and a wireless joystick hooked up to it. I had written some very nice code a while back for controlling the SSC-32 with a joystick over a bluetooth serial link and it was very straight forward to modify it to use the Xbee modules. I have dubbed it Turtle Bot because it frankly looks like a turtle with its plastic shell on and it is sloooowww. Now I just need to find a use for it! It’s not like I have any lawns to mow. Leave me any suggestions in the comments.