Putting Sand, Water, and Metal into A 3D Print

[Adam] over at Makefast Workshop writes about some of the tests they’ve been running on their 3D printer. They experimented with pausing a 3D print midway and inserting various materials into the print. In this case, sand, water, and metal BBs.

The first experiment was a mixture of salt and water used to make a can chiller for soda or beer (the blue thing in the upper right). It took some experimentation to get a print that didn’t leak and was strong. For example, if the water was too cold the print could come off the plate or delaminate. If …read more

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Enjoy The Last Throes of Summer With a Nice Pool Automation Project

[Ken Rumer] bought a new house. It came with a troublingly complex pool system. It had solar heating. It had gas heating. Electricity was involved somehow. It had timers and gadgets. Sand could be fed into one end and clean water came out the other. There was even a spa thrown into the mix.

Needless to say, within the first few months of owning their very own chemical plant they ran into some near meltdowns. They managed to heat the pool with 250 dollars of gas in a day. They managed to drain the spa entirely into the pool, but …read more

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Home Pool Added to Home Automation

Anyone who owns their own pool knows it’s not as simple as filling it up with water and jumping in whenever you want. There’s pool covers to deal with, regular cleaning with the pool vacuum and skimmers, and of course, all of the chemicals that have to be added to keep the water safe. While there are automatic vacuums, there aren’t a whole lot of options for automating the pool chemicals. [Clément] decided to tackle this problem, eliminating one more task from the maintenance of his home. (Google Translate from French.)

The problem isn’t as simple as adding a set …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Profiling Underwater Light

The goal for the Citizen Science portion of the Hackaday Prize is to empower people to create their own devices to perform their own analyses For [Adam]’s project, he’s designing a device that measures the health of waterways simply by looking at the light availability through the water column. It’s called PULSE, the Profiling Underwater Light SEnsor, and is able to monitor changes that are caused by algal blooms, suspended sediments, or sewer runoff.

The design of PULSE is a small electronic depth charge that can be lowered into a water column from anything between a research vessel to a …read more

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A Fountain of Superhydrophobic Art

Superhydrophobic coating finds a new application in art through [Arthur Carabott] in the form of a bizarre fountain.

A Master’s student in the Global Innovation Design course at the London Royal College of Art, [Carabott] achieved the effect by leaving parts of the laser-cut acrylic untouched by Rust-oleum’s NeverWet Multisurface coating. A 3d printed spigot mounted high above the surface imparts greater velocity to the impacting water so as it hits the acrylic the liquid forms into channels giving the impression of something surreal. Indeed — his design is inspired by the optical illusions of Japanese mathematician Kokichi Sugihara which …read more

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Paraffin Oil and Water Dot Matrix Display

In preparation for Makerfaire, [hwhardsoft] needed to throw together some demos. So they dug deep and produced this unique display.

The display uses two synchronized peristaltic pumps to push water and red paraffin through a tube that switches back over itself in a predictable fashion. As visible in the video after the break, the pumps go at it for a few minutes producing a seemingly random pattern. The pattern coalesces at the end into a short string of text. The text is unfortunately fairly hard to read, even on a contrasting background. Perhaps an application of UV dye could help? …read more

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