Author Archives: Manuel Rodriguez-Achach

A gas model made of magnets

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Magnets are great stuff and everyone loves them, there are so many things you can do with them, including creating a model of the crystalline structure of solids, just as [Cody´sLab] did using a bunch of magnets inside a pair of plexiglass sheets.

Many materials have their atoms arranged in a highly ordered microscopic structure – a crystal-, including most metals, rocks, ceramics and ice, among others. The structure emerges when the material solidifies looking for the minimum energy configuration. Every atom interacts with its neighbors via microscopic forces forming several patterns depending on the specific material and conditions.

In …read more

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Invention Killed the Inventor

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The desire to innovate and change the world can drive one to take dangerous risks. Sometimes, inventors pay the ultimate price. Inventors can be early testers of a device under development, and sometimes pushing the limits of what’s possible has deadly consequences. In this era of warning labels on coffee cups, it’s perhaps worth taking a look back at some inventors of the past who lost their lives in the pursuit of building something new.

First Aviation Fatality

Jean-Francoise Pilatre de Rozier was an early aviation pioneer, as well as a chemistry and physics teacher. He and Marquis d’Arlandes made …read more

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Invention Killed the Inventor

Posted on by

The desire to innovate and change the world can drive one to take dangerous risks. Sometimes, inventors pay the ultimate price. Inventors can be early testers of a device under development, and sometimes pushing the limits of what’s possible has deadly consequences. In this era of warning labels on coffee cups, it’s perhaps worth taking a look back at some inventors of the past who lost their lives in the pursuit of building something new.

First Aviation Fatality

Jean-Francoise Pilatre de Rozier was an early aviation pioneer, as well as a chemistry and physics teacher. He and Marquis d’Arlandes made …read more

Continue reading Invention Killed the Inventor→

Model of a Transmission Line

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Transmission lines are the kind of thing that seems to confuse beginners. After all, the fact that short-circuits can have infinite impedance and open-circuits can behave like a short is not intuitive at all!. That’s why we like [Tinselkoala]’s latest video that shows a nice model of a transmission line. It helps to understand the line as inductors and capacitors in series-parallel connection.

Any pair of wires used to transmit electrical power have tiny amounts of inductance and capacitance. This is not a problem with DC or low-frequency AC, but when the frequency is sufficiently high, weird things start to …read more

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A Brief History of Radioactivity

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More than one hundred years ago, Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium emitted penetrating rays similar to those used by Wilhelm Röntgen to take the first X-ray image (of his wife’s hand), starting a new era of far-reaching applications. There are of course many dangers that come with the use of radioactivity, but there are also many beneficial uses for our society.

WHAT IS RADIOACTIVITY

The nucleus of an atom is made of protons and neutrons. Because protons have positive charge, they repel each other, so there must be a force that holds the nucleus together, and the neutrons don’t help, …read more

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Cheap and Easy Emergency Butane Stove

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Homemade stoves are a very popular hack, you can find a zillion videos on YouTube, mostly on alcohol stoves, and they work great. Less common are butane fueled stoves, but [Thomas Kim] has uploaded a video on a super easy and cheap butane stove.

Like many other DIY stoves, the body is a soda aluminum can. After sealing the top side with aluminum foil, you just need to drill some holes in it. Other necessary components are a metal tube and a syringe needle that acts as flow regulator. [Thomas Kim] makes an interesting fixture that is attached to the …read more

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The Surface Area to Volume Ratio or Why Elephants Have Big Ears

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There are very few things that are so far reaching across many different disciplines, ranging from biology to engineering, as is the relation of the surface area to the volume of a body. This is not a law, as Newton’s second one, or a theory as Darwin’s evolution theory. But it has consequences in a diverse set of situations. It explains why cells are the size they are, why some animals have a strange morphology, why flour explodes while wheat grains don’t and many other phenomena that we will explore in this article.

What Is SA:V?

All bodies have a …read more

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Easy Free Piston Stirling Engine

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Stirling engines are really cool machines, invented by Reverend Dr. Robert Stirling in 1816 to rival the steam engine, they are one of the most efficient engines ever conceived.  Building one is a very rewarding experience, but it has a certain level of difficulty. However, [Attila Blade]’s version of a free-piston type Stirling engine is simple enough to be built in a matter of minutes.

To build the engine you only need a test tube, steel wool, a latex glove, an O ring and some wire. The construction is straightforward as you can see in the video. The whole engine …read more

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Hacking a Vintage TV into an Oscilloscope

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Do you still have an old analog CRT  television lying around? With the advent of digital signals, analog TV´s are going to the dumpster or the recycling center. But you can still put them to good use, just as [GreatScott!] did, by converting the TV into a crude oscilloscope.

The trick is to take control of the two deflection coils that move the electron beam inside the CRT in the horizontal and vertical directions. The video describes in detail the process of identifying the coils and using an Arduino nano in combination with a DAC to amplify the input signal …read more

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Hacking a Vintage TV into an Oscilloscope

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Do you still have an old analog CRT  television lying around? With the advent of digital signals, analog TV´s are going to the dumpster or the recycling center. But you can still put them to good use, just as [GreatScott!] did, by converting the TV into a crude oscilloscope.

The trick is to take control of the two deflection coils that move the electron beam inside the CRT in the horizontal and vertical directions. The video describes in detail the process of identifying the coils and using an Arduino nano in combination with a DAC to amplify the input signal …read more

Continue reading Hacking a Vintage TV into an Oscilloscope→