Category Archives: potato

Self Driving Potato Hits the Road

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Potatoes deserve to roam the earth, so [Marek Baczynski] created the first self-driving potato, ushering in a new era of potato rights. Potato batteries have been around forever. Anyone who’s played Portal 2 knows that with a copper and zinc electrode, you can get a bit of current out of a potato. Tubers have been powering clocks for decades in science classrooms around the world. It’s time for something — revolutionary.

[Marek] knew that powering a timepiece wasn’t enough for his potato, so he picked up a Texas Instruments BQ25504 boost converter energy harvesting chip. A potato can output around  …read more

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Weaponizing Elementary Science Experiments

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[austiwawa] was playing around with one of those simple linear motors people build as friendly little science experiments. There’s an AA battery in the middle of a set of magnets. When you put it inside of a spring it zips around inside until you run out of spring or magic pixies in the battery.

Of course, the natural question arose, “How do I make it go fast!? Like fast!” After making explosion and woosh noises for a bit (like any good hacker would) he settled down and asked a more specific question. If I made the coil the barrel of …read more

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Forget Lithium Battery Technology, Just Boil A Potato

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These researchers are taking this development so seriously we can’t help but be suspicious that, perhaps, they are all deeply embroiled in a bet to see who could get funding for and complete research in the most absurd technological advancement.

Most of us have had a science teacher desperately try to alleviate the drudgery of standardized test centric science education by dramatically putting a copper nail and a zinc nail into a potato or lemon. “Behold, we can measure a voltage with this voltmeter. If you get asked what a voltmeter is on a test, here is a definition none …read more

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The Potowitzer: A Rapid Fire Potato Cannon

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If you’ve ever fired a potato cannon, you’ll know that they are a raucous good time, but are somewhat clumsy to reload after each shot. Seeing an opportunity to improve on the design and minimize the delay between launches, [Danger First] have concocted a fast reloading potato cannon — or should I say — Potowitzer.

The key here is that they’ve gone through the extra effort of designing and building honest-to-goodness artillery rounds for their Potowitzer’s manual breech-loading mechanism. Foregoing the inconsistency of potatoes, they’ve 3D printed a bevy of bullets and sealed them with propane gas into PVC pipe …read more

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Reverse Engineering the McDonald’s French Fry

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McDonald’s is serious about their fries. When they were forced by shifting public opinion (drunkenly swaggering around as it always does) to switch from their beef tallow and cottonseed oil mixture to a vegetable oil mixture; they spent millions to find a solution that retained the taste. How they make the fries is not the worlds most closely guarded secret, but they do have a unique flavor, texture, and appearance which is a product of lots of large scale industrial processes. [J. Kenji López-Alt] decided to reverse engineer the process.

His first problem was of procurement. He could easily buy …read more

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