#Mastodon post by Damien Miller showing his radioactivity counter consisting of “a BC-412 plastic scintillator and an imperfectly-matched PMT pulled from some eBay scrap,” tested with a thoriated TIG rod. #scouting #bootstrapping
on 02026-08-18#Witchcraft-and-Alchemy #video about #bootstrapping thinner aluminum #foil material for a ribbon microphone, noting that the usual stuff is about 10μm, testing with a micrometer, while ribbon-microphone #sensors are ideally 1.5–3μm. He reduces the thickness of household foil by etching the foil with NaOH #materials, 4g dissolved in 200mℓ of water (½ molar, he says), which evidently thins the foil fairly evenly. He glued foil to some plastic roundrects to hold it in place during the process. There’s a point where the foil becomes a very fine mesh, some time before being ripped apart by the hydrogen bubbles after about half an hour. He did a 4-liter test to try to hold temperature more constant. I suspect you could get smoother dissolution with the proper regime of #electrolysis, reducing asperities, but he didn’t try that. For thickness measurement, he did the same repeated-folding-in-half thing that I did, but with a micrometer instead of calipers or a ruler to measure the result. He says some of the foil had “the structural integrity of a wet paper towel,” making the process more difficult. The thinnest acts like gold leaf, sticking to his tweezers. The data shows a linear decline in thickness from 10μm at 5 minutes to 0 at 40 minutes, with a 35-minute sample being 2.2μm thick.
So he made some more samples; he tried to etch them for 32 minutes (before a citric-acid stop bath and water rinse) but they fell apart at 25 minutes.
In order to compensate for unknown temperature and agitation variations, he decided to measure the foil’s resistance during the etch process with a constant current. For #metrology, he amplifies the voltage drop across the foil with a differential-to-single-ended converter based on a LM833 dual op-amp #electronics, with an LM317 set up as a 100mA constant-current source, and a couple of relays set up to reverse the current direction through the foil to eliminate any offset errors, including from any unintended galvanic cells. Also he used an angle grinder to cut some blank PCB into a four-wire Kelvin probe so he’s only measuring the resistance of the foil itself, not the resistance of the copper leading down to the foil. The copper is painted black, presumably to protect it from the NaOH. And he’s using something like a Black Pill to record the data.
The 10μm foil is about 70mΩ (=7mV) at first, decreasing roughly linearly with less than 10nm of noise, enabling thinning the foil down to under a micron before it broke.
If you were doing this electrolytically, you could presumably stop the etch directly from the microcontroller with a transistor or even directly from a GPIO.
Then he repeats the etching with a large sample in the same bath with the thin foil strip whose resistance he’s measuring. And then he corrugates his foil ribbon microphone ribbons before etching them to thin them, which answers a burning question I had, and then he recorded the video with the resulting microphone!
An amusing editing trick is that he recorded himself erasing a whiteboard drawing line by line with his finger, then played the video backwards with a voiceover to make it look like he’s drawing with his finger.
on 02026-08-11#Blondihacks explains her approach to etching #PCBs for #electronics #hardware with Stephen Hobley’s recipe with vinegar and peroxide. #tutorial #bootstrapping #scouting
on 02026-08-06Stephen Hobley’s recipe for etching #PCBs for #electronics #hardware with 3% H₂O₂, 5%-acidity white vinegar from Meijer, and some salt; this might form peracetic acid #materials. #bootstrapping
on 02026-08-06#Rain1’s "Tarot" #Scheme compiler is a Scheme compiler written in 1907 lines of Scheme, which (when compiled) runs on top of a virtual machine implemented in 2033 lines of C, can compile itself, and can be run from plain sources on the Tinyscheme interpreter in about 10 minutes. #small-is-beautiful #bootstrapping
on 02026-07-30Emily #Velasco on #Mastodon firing clay into #ceramics for printed-circuit-board #electronics, successfully building an astable-multivibrator circuit. #DIY #bootstrapping #scouting
on 02026-06-03#Siraben (Ben Siraphob) is trying to get #Guix’s fully-built-from-source #Mono into #Nix. #security #bootstrapping #toread
on 02026-05-20#Mono in #Guix is fully built from source code for #security. #bootstrapping #toread
on 02026-05-20#Primitive-Technology #video about drying roof tiles on the heated ondol floor of the new heated-floor hut. He used his heated-floor chimney to smoke some firewood stacked inside the hut (to get rid of insects?) but then it collapsed in the rain, so he rebuilt it with dry-stacked fired bricks, which was more economical in material as well. He made a new lightweight mold for roof tile curvature from bark whose tree had rotted away, and having laid out some 45 roof tiles on the floor, he heated it back up to dry them out. #bushcraft #bootstrapping #scouting
on 02026-04-09#video #toread on #bootstrapping aluminum-air #batteries
on 02026-01-14#video on #bootstrapping aluminum-air #batteries with charcoal. Pounds homemade wood charcoal with hammer in a rag, then powders in a blender and adds (non-gelatinized!) cassava starch and water as a binder. Pounds this paste, still lacking any electrolyte, into a cut-off rectangular aluminum profile with a wooden ramstick, producing 7 bricks he sun-dries. Inexplicably he then puts the dried bricks into 7 aluminum profiles, using surgical masks as separators to prevent electrical contact. His current collector for the charcoal is a graphite rod from a carbon-zinc AA battery. Oh, and finally he adds seawater as his electrolyte. Measures 860mV open-circuit initially. Unclear how air is supposed to get to the cathode. Maybe he doesn’t know that’s necessary?
on 02026-01-14#video on #bootstrapping “#Precision on a Budget” for a US$10 micron-resolution displacement sensor. Specifically he’s using the 8-blade linear-movement flexure Gelbart taught, but made it out of plastic with #3D-printing, with a knife edge in the beam path of an optointerruptor, which he superglued into it once he found the linear region of the optointerruptor. A steel BB on the other end of the linear-motion stage serves as his “stylus” for feeling a shaft or whatever he wants to measure the displacement of. Then he calibrates it with grade-0 (±150nm) gauge blocks from Mitutoyo. He estimates his error at ±5μm over a range of 700μm.
on 02025-12-09#Primitive-Technology #video on #bootstrapping iron smelting from just a natural-draft wood fire: no bellows, no blower, and the only charcoal was mixed into an ore brick.
on 02025-12-05turning a GPS/LTE modem into a web server. #hoarding #bootstrapping
on 02025-11-27#Cesar #video on converting a microwave fan into a household fan by soldering it onto a lightbulb base and heatshrinking a PET bottle over it. #DIY #bootstrapping #hoarding
on 02025-11-11#Cesar #video on a microwave kiln using carborundum in bentonite to paint the walls of a hollow in an alumina firebrick #DIY #bootstrapping
on 02025-11-11#video on sharpening knives on the bottoms of pottery and stuff. #toread #bootstrapping #DIY
on 02025-11-11High-speed data acquisition over #HDMI #electronics #hardware #bootstrapping #DIY
on 02025-11-05#video on #bootstrapping a #DIY #vacuum chamber by reversing a bicycle pump piston and making a #jugaad check valve by dropping a BB into a Schrader car tire valve with the valve core taken out. Gravity I guess keeps the BB from falling out of the valve, because it faces up.
on 02025-10-21#DIY #vacuum tube #video for #bootstrapping #electronics #toread
on 02025-10-21#DIY #vacuum #video with a thick sheet of polycarbonate on top of a pressure-cooker pot with a silicone cooking mat as a gasket, tapping the hole in the polycarbonate using vise-grips as the tap wrench, drilled and tapped to match whatever your vacuum gauge hose fittings want. An O-ring compressed between a flange on the hose fitting and the polycarbonate surface by the tightening thread on the hose fitting provides the seal to the hose fitting. Doesn’t even damage the pressure cooker. But it’s not very DIY in the sense that he’s using a refrigeration vacuum pump to make it work, which is a bit like building an entire automobile starting with just some scrap metal, hand tools, and a Volkswagen Beetle. #manufacturing #bootstrapping
on 02025-10-21#Hyperspace-Pirate #video on #bootstrapping/#manufacturing a #DIY #jugaad CT-scan #tomography #radiography machine (using a donated dental #X-ray machine and an “intensifier screen”) and #3D-printing the results. He triggers his phone’s camera app with a spring-loaded pin controlled by an Arduino-triggered relay. Lowest power setting is 60kV, 4mA. He hacks the images with the GIMP to get reasonable grayscale, then feeds them into the open-source “3D Slicer” to try to do computed tomography, but it didn’t actually do tomography, just meshing once you’ve already done the tomography, so he used a “cone-beam backprojection tool by Stanislav Maslan” for that. The result is pretty noisy but he can 3-D print it. He scans a frozen dead rat, a star-shaped squash, a frozen sardine, and a large fish head.
on 02025-10-20#Hyperspace-Pirate #video on #bootstrapping/#manufacturing a #DIY #jugaad #X-ray #radiography machine #toread
on 02025-10-20#Primitive-Technology grass mat loom #video. The loom is horizontal so it can be three meters long, but I feel like it is at an inconvenient height for working at, and also involves a lot of walking back and forth. Then he uses the mats as thatch for a small lean-to shelter, which seems like a pretty suboptimal use for them (“Gaps will let rain through”, as he says, so he folds them double), but I guess he doesn’t sleep out in the bush. Also I think he probably needs to treat them with some kind of preservative to keep them from rotting, smoke at least. #scouting #bushcraft #bootstrapping
on 02025-10-07#video by #Hyperspace-Pirate on #bootstrapping ozone #materials with corona discharge instead of brown nitrogen dioxide with thermal plasma arcs. A Leyden-jar sort of arrangement with water on the inside and a mesh on the outside seemed to work well, and then he switched to just using test tubes filled with water to keep arcs from burning through the glass. But what he really wanted were nitrates, and the Birkeland–Eyde process is 40 times more efficient. “So, anyway, that’s the fun world of ozone. It smells terrible and I hate it. Bye.”
on 02025-06-17#Integza #bootstrapping rocket propeller #video
on 02025-06-17#Akio finally built a better #switched-reluctance motor, with laminated stator and rotor, which he got laser-cut from 60 layers of 1mm non-electrical steel for €200, 16 turns of ½mm² copper wire on each of his 12 stator poles. 2000 rpm, 400mA, with no load, 1–2A when stalled with his fingers on the shaft, no torque or power measurements given. #motors #hardware #bootstrapping #DIY
on 02025-06-17#video of #bootstrapping a #CNC mill under AU$500 with a focus on rigidity and a small footprint with #3D-printing, using a non-gantry design to improve rigidity. A steel Allthread skeleton is wrapped in 3-D printed forms for the concrete, PLA with seams sealed with superglue. I don’t really understand how the threaded inserts in the concrete work; maybe the screw presses the 3-D printed plastic out against the concrete walls? He uses a vibrating sander as his vibrator for the concrete pour; after initial one-hour set, scraping with a spatula removes excess concrete. He says “non-gantry” but he’s using two sets of two parallel linear rails for the X and Y axes; it’s just that he’s moving the workpiece with anti-backlash-spring-loaded leadscrews rather than the toolhead. He’s also just using NEMA 17 steppers instead of real servos. #manufacturing
on 02025-06-16#Nighthawk #video on waterproofing and stiffening #cardboard by brushing on 500mℓ isopropanol, 125g shellac, 15g beeswax (emulsified), 2g metal stearate (slowly stirred on low heat on an electric burner outdoors). Also demonstrates a totally game changing edge-sealing technique where you cut halfway through the cardboard to isolate one side, then fold it over. Also you can stiffen the surface with wheat paste. And maybe pasting on extra layers of newspaper or paper bags. Also, you can edge-splice panels with the same cut-halfway-through technique and then pasting the sides thus isolated. He also touts his waterproofing mix as a way to make fabric waterproof, showing some very impressive demo video. His second waterproofing recipe is 100g EVA hot glue diluted with 25g paraffin wax and 20mℓ mineral oil. He also demonstrates homemade lampblack with a vegetable oil candle under an aluminum tray for UV protection, but thinks calcium stearate might work well enough for UV protection, which is his reason for including it; he recommends reacting soluble sodium stearate (made from stearic acid and lye) in water with sulfate of aluminum, zinc, or magnesium, or muriate of lime, to form the insoluble metal stearate. Doesn’t contain his usual total mangling of the science. #DIY #bootstrapping #materials
on 02025-06-14#bootstrapping #bushcraft #video #firestarting with a standing dead snag, split into kindling with an axe and then shaved into a feather stick for tinder, then using ferrocerium to ignite the feather stick. #DIY
on 02025-06-13#bushcraft #video with #firestarting using a log to weight the bow drill. Uses a saw to cut the notches in his hearthboard. #bootstrapping #DIY
on 02025-06-13#video on #bushcraft myths (widely believed falsehoods), showing among other things the use of a tree trunk as a weight to put pressure on a bow drill for #firestarting. Also demonstrates using a sandwich bag full of water for firestarting. But the video is mostly about safe berry foraging. #bootstrapping
on 02025-06-13#video on 13 #firestarting techniques: rubbing a roll of ash inside a cotton ball between two boards, spontaneous combustion of “boiled” linseed oil (two hours of oily rags in a cardboard box on a cold day started to smoke, then burst into flames at 4h25m), steel wool and 9V batteries (or 3 AAs), a firepiston, KMnO₄ and glycerin, ferrocerium rods (with cotton balls, steel wool, jute twine, or magnesium shavings), fire-plow style (at which he fails), fire-saw style with bamboo (sort of an inverted fireplow) at which he also failed, beating steel on an anvil with a hammer until red-hot, a flashlight reflector as a non-imaging optical concentrator on charcloth, a bow drill (commercially sold with ball bearings, or improvised with paracord, which failed), and finally a hand drill, which he didn’t even really try. And then a rope lighter, which is like a cigarette lighter that uses rope for fuel. #DIY #bootstrapping #bushcraft
on 02025-06-13#firestarting #video by #CrazyRussianHacker using the fire-plow method. #DIY #bootstrapping #bushcraft
on 02025-06-13#firestarting #video where a Scotsman struggles greatly with hand drills. After many attempts with a bow drill made with his shoelace, he gets embers, which go out. Finally, after 8 hours of attempts spread over 6 days, he is able to start a fire, a feat he is then able to replicate on the beach later. #DIY #bootstrapping
on 02025-06-13#PDF #paper on prehistoric #firestarting, “Wood Usage and Fire Veneration in the Pamir, Xinjiang, 2500 yr BP”. “People also specifically chose inflammable Populus wood to make hearth boards and hand drills (both are used for making fire by drilling), rigid Betula wood to craft wooden plates.” The hand drill spindle isn’t very straight! #DIY #bootstrapping #bushcraft
on 02025-06-1325-minute #WIRED #video on #firestarting by an anthropology professor using hand drills or bow drills, with a notched hearthboard with a divot, and a spindle. He recommends using bone-dry wood, and not using a resinous wood for the hearthboard, nor anything that’s too hard, something you can dent with your fingernail, like basswood or tulip poplar or (contradictorily) cedar. For the spindle he suggests cattail, horseweed, mullein, or goldenrod, because it needs to be straight and also somewhat soft. He suggests splitting a stick to make the hearthboard, either twice, or once while shaving down the back. He likes cedar inner bark for tinder, and he uses birchbark under the notch to catch the ember. He breaks the spindle. “Son of a bitch.” He spits on hands to improve friction with the spindle. Looks exactly like Primitive Technology’s technique, except that he uses a tiny stick to remove the hearthboard safely from the ember without breaking it. The cinematography (cuts between spindle changes, etc.) greatly interferes with seeing the technique clearly. For natural fibers for a bow drill, he suggests dogbane, but prefers brain-tanned deerhide. #DIY #bootstrapping #bushcraft
on 02025-06-13#TKOR #video on #firestarting by rubbing sticks together, linearly, fire-plow style. Not very convincing but he claims to have made it work. #DIY #bootstrapping #bushcraft
on 02025-06-13latest #Primitive-Technology #video on “belt and pulley blower” covers bark twine, leaf-fiber-reinforced dried clay, crushed-ceramic grog, clay bats, etc. Dried-clay pulleys break, unsurprisingly, even with crushed-leaf reinforcement, but do work for a while. 17-warp larger cane wicker pulley doesn’t break. Wood stake frames lashed with bark. Split-stick crank clamps shaft. He sets up a wicker “floating wheel” which permits his twine belt to fan the fire somewhat higher. #ceramics #DIY #bootstrapping
on 02025-06-12#video by #Not-an-Engineer about #bootstrapping #CNC #manufacturing. About half talking-head filler. #toread
on 02025-05-29#Applied-Science #video on #bootstrapping “insanely powerful” planetary ball mill grinder to make α'' iron nitride filled epoxy for magnets, which did work somewhat; he tested it in a 1.6-tesla vibrating sample magnetometer he built using a lock-in amplifier to plot its B–H curve.
on 02025-05-28#video on glass-ceramic #materials like Robax and Zerodur for #bootstrapping optical instruments from household materials, measuring their CTE with a homemade length measuring rig and an infrared thermometer. Also mentions “Photoform” photolithographable glass. He explains how lithium (and zinc) silicoaluminates have a negative CTE and thus convey a vanishing CTE on the glass-ceramic composite, and how 1-6% of titania or zirconia is included as a nucleation agent. He recommends Bach (ed.)’s book Low Thermal Expansion Glass Ceramics.
on 02025-03-25#video #toread on #bootstrapping #DIY SLS #3D-printing using Inova
on 02025-03-22#video on #3D-printing in metal with laser SLM in a #DIY rig #bootstrapping #manufacturing #toread
on 02025-03-22another #machining #video, by #My-Engines, on die-sink #EDM based on Ben Fleming’s book, using varying sizes of capacitors in an RC setup (16μF, 32μF, 192μF) with the lower capacitances giving a finer finish. He has some detergent (“wetting agent”) in his water electrolyte, presumably an nonionic surfactant (he says his tap water works better than deionized or distilled). However, though big electrodes worked fine, his thin copper and brass sheet electrodes eroded too rapidly, and he wasn’t able to get a stable “burn” out of either them or graphite. Lamp oil worked better than vegetable oil or water for him. #electronics #bootstrapping
on 02025-03-12#machining #video by #AndysMachines on his die-sink #EDM #machining #manufacturing setup. He’s using an aquariump pump to circulate his distilled-water electrolyte through a coffee filter, which needs changing often. He switched to a photo-flash 160μF capacitor for his IGBT-triggered 60V sparks (averaging around 50V). The #electronics use two DRV8825 stepper drivers, though they have trouble with the noise; the die advances when the current averages below an adjustable limit of 2.5 amps, and then there are periodic retractions to permit better flushing. He measures the capacitor voltage with a voltage divider to estimate the current. #bootstrapping
on 02025-03-12#video by #AndysMachines on #EDM #machining, using an RC circuit to limit the energy of each spark and an IGBT to switch it, with 20μs on and 180μs off time (5kHz 10%), 60V, a 100μF electrolytic cap (which gets too hot), a heating element to limit the cap’s inrush current, a 3mm brass electrode cutting aluminum, and just distilled water for the dielectric. He makes it through 1mm of aluminum in 23 seconds, 18mm³/minute. #electronics #manufacturing #bootstrapping
on 02025-03-12#video of die-sink #EDM #machining in diesel fuel using an Arduino, a MOSFET for PWM, a halogen worklight in series to limit current, and a stepper motor. #TheIdahoanShow reports that motor oil, WD-40, and canola oil also work, and aluminum and brass (such as a cartridge case) both work well as electrode materials, but TIG welder electrodes tended to stick and not cut very well. Stainless “kind of worked”. His demo was to cut a plus-sign-shaped hole into a chunk of old file. #bootstrapping #DIY #jugaad #manufacturing
on 02025-03-12#video on #Grandpa-Amu #bootstrapping a pedal-driven wood #lathe, including a three-jaw chuck consisting of three bolts in a piece of wood with captive nuts. Also demonstrates bow drill, the kind of workbench you sit on, etc. Rather than using a pole for the return spring he cuts a piece from a bicycle inner tube.
on 02025-02-22#Primitive-Technology #video on a smelt (#bootstrapping #materials) with a flywheel-driven blower, giving disappointing results.
on 02025-02-06#Applied-Science had to replace the image sensor chip on his camera PCB many times in order to use an oil-immersion microscope objective backwards as an f/0.38 lens (f=4mm). #electronics #hardware #optics #video #bootstrapping #toread
on 02025-02-05#bootstrapping a ribbon microphone by hand-corrugating signwriter’s leaf, which turns out to be aluminum 500 nanometers thick. #manufacturing
on 02025-01-22#video on #Hyperspace-Pirate #bootstrapping DIY #CNC upgrades. He drilled the aluminum parts (on his drill press, I assume) with locator jigs made with #3D-printing; that’s almost 3-D printing of aluminum, right? Two nuts on every leadscrew, separated by a nut block, can be preloaded (with four screws in each nut) to reduce leadscrew backlash. His gantry machine frame is largely #8020 rail held together with 3-D printed PLA brackets. He says FreeCAD is very intuitive and easy to use.
on 02024-12-27#video in #Italian on #bootstrapping a metal-melting oven with a methane burner made from gas pipe and wire and teflon tape. Demonstrates a hand-driven aluminum hole saw cutting a large circular hole through insulating refractory.
on 02024-12-22#video on #bootstrapping "Neurostimduino" #TENS and EMS neurostimulation unit with a 25mA current limit on each channel. One-minute ad. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-12-14#video on #bootstrapping #TENS #electronics from what looks like a 555 and a 9-volt battery and some aluminum foil. #toread
on 02024-12-14#TENS #electronics #bootstrapping #video with a 556 timer and a power transistor on some perfboard in a painted wooden box with some pots and a couple of stainless steel paddle electrodes. Just photos.
on 02024-12-14#video on #bootstrapping #TENS sponge electrodes made from aluminum foil and baking-soda water
on 02024-12-14#video on #bootstrapping acetylene #materials via calcium carbide from seashells and driftwood in an arc furnace made by winding 50 turns of 8-gauge wire through the hole of a large toroidal transformer from a 110VAC→240VAC converter. The wire turned out to be too thin, so he rewound it with 25 turns of 6-gauge. He kept melting his improvised furnace made from firebrick, so he switched to using a stainless-steel cup and a “skull crucible”. #scouting
on 02024-11-14#video on #bootstrapping silicon materials from waterglass and ethanol, says acetic acid works too, though 1M acetic acid in a ziploc bag didn’t work very well. However, his silicone rubber kept creeping and exuding waterglass. A commenter claims that polyvinyl alcohol or acetate also works great and is super bouncy.
on 02024-11-05#video about #bootstrapping salt #materials by oxidizing urea (from #CodysLab urine) with bacteria on a charcoal packed bed supported on hardware cloth with a process tower made of a Rubbermaid trashcan and a 200ℓ drum, with water sprayed through plastic pipes connected via tee hose barbs, mounted with baling wire, using a powerline timer to run the pump a couple of hours a day. An aquarium bubbler keeps the reservoir aerated; an aluminized tarp keeps sunlight off to prevent algae. I thought this might emit a lot of ammonia, but he said, “I knew I had fed it too much when it started to smell like a truck stop bathroom,” but normally it smells like a “well-cycled fishtank”. Calcium carbonate chips in the reservoir keep the pH from dropping too low for the bacteria. He thinks he would need a machine three times bigger to process all his urine.
on 02024-10-30#video about #bootstrapping pure #materials from fertilizers. Like calcium nitrate from the hydrated double salt with ammonia. (Boiling with slaked lime drives out the ammonia as gas.) Urea he simply recrystallizes with water. Ammonium sulfate he recrystallizes with water by evaporation, which is tedious because you can’t crystallize it by cooling. By #Apoptosis. #scouting
on 02024-10-30#video on #bootstrapping H₂SO₄ from epsom salt with a PbO₂ electrode and a clay pot #materials #scouting
on 02024-10-23#video on #3D-printing forms you fill with concrete for #bootstrapping #machining tools like a lathe
on 02024-10-22#video about #manufacturing #aluminum-air #batteries with #3D-printing ABS. He says potassium hydroxide will eat PLA, which makes sense but which I hadn’t realized. #Mr-Electron here is using steel baling wire for his cathodes. For his anode he cuts up thick aluminum sheet metal with shears and then presses it flat in a vise. Each aluminum anode plate is crimped onto baling wire from the following cell in the battery using a hammer and anvil. He gets 10.2V open-circuit voltage from 8 series cells. I’m unclear how air is supposed to get to his cathodes. He does some load testing with small electric motors but doesn’t actually measure the current. The short-circuit current he measures is 160mA and rapidly dropping. After testing with LEDs for a while the open-circuit voltage has dropped to 3.8 volts. Later he cuts cathode forms out of CDs with an angle grinder and cutoff disc, wrapping them tightly with baling wire to maximize area. His higher-current anodes are aluminum-foil-wrapped popsicle sticks, dimensioned to fit inside the battery compartments, but for whatever reason he didn’t install the plates parallel, resulting in a dramatically unnecessarily high internal battery resistance, which he doesn’t bother to measure, but he gets 240mA out of it. His connections to the aluminum plates are made by torquing a pringled steel washer down onto their non-submerged ends with a bolt. The 6 cells in series ought to give about 9.6 volts open-circuit, but instead he gets only 4.8V (0.8V per cell), which he blames on residual sulfuric acid contamination, but commenter “gsestream” suggests might be due to a lack of oxygen. He uses a DFRobot USB boost converter to charge his cellphone. #bootstrapping #scouting #jugaad
on 02024-10-18#video on #bootstrapping a DIY #CNC #machining mill under US$100 by #Hyperspace-Pirate, somehow including multiple-start leadscrews, brass nuts for them, etc. He’s #3D-printing the brackets to hold the aluminum together. Basically a bunch of aluminum extrusions (largely 8020 style held onto the brackets with T-nuts) to make a bedslinger gantry, which he can now mill aluminum on. The slinging is all happening with leadscrews instead of timing belts. He’s using NEMA steppers with shaft couplers, lots of Allen screws, precision-ground rods with linear ball bearings running on them, etc. Not super practical for poor people! The simple rectangular design maximizes compliance, which is counterproductive. And it’s going to lose steps and ruin parts from the end effector side loading. “I’m using a 24V 20A power supply which is way beyond what the machine needs but it’s what I had sitting around.” He’s running GRBL on an Arduino Uno, with A4988 breakout boards on an Arduino shield on top of it to drive the steppers. For whatever reason he decided to run the spindle off a 555 PWM driving an IRLZ34N MOSFET. He’s using UGS (Universal Gcode Platform) on his laptop to send the G-code to GRBL. He engraves and routes some wood with a ⅛” endmill. Rigidity problems initially prevent cutting aluminum. Budget: US$30 for spindle motor and collet (1.5A), US$24 for the build plate (¼” aluminum), US$11 linear bearings, US$10 extra endmills, total US$75.
on 02024-09-24#video of reusing #hoarding old earphones for #electronics #hardware. There’s a continuity-tester Android app, haha! Nice #jugaad with a 2.2kΩ resistor desoldered from a power-supply board, hot glue, and heat-shrink tape. And apparently there’s also a TV remote control Android app called ZaZaRemote by Tiqiaa if you plug infrared LEDs into your microphone port, which the app knows under the name “Smart-ZaZa” or “Audio-IR device”. #bootstrapping
on 02024-09-24#video #toread about #3D-printing woodworking tools #bootstrapping #manufacturing
on 02024-09-05#video #toread about #3D-printing tools #bootstrapping #manufacturing #teaching-tech
on 02024-09-05#video on #manufacturing SO₃ #materials #bootstrapping by #NurdRage. I didn’t know you could dehydrate H₂SO₄ with H₄P₂O₇! But he’s dehydrating it with Na₂S₂O₇ instead.
on 02024-09-04#video of #bootstrapping dichromate #materials from stainless? He starts by dissolving 18/0 stainless steel forks in 98% H₂SO₄. To 789g of forks and 250g H₂SO₄ he added water. He got hydrogen bubbles and a green solution and the plastic tub started melting from the heat, so he added distilled-water ice. He used 920g sulfuric acid total. After three days much of the forks had dissolved. After a week much of the forks were dissolved and he lost patience. He tried to separate the iron sulfate from the chromium sulfate with a water recrystallization and got a lot of it out. He had 127 grams of forks left, so 662 grams dissolved. A third vacuum filtration removed most of the carbon powder. 1.5kg of sodium carbonate, a large excess, converted the chromium sulfate into hydroxide and the residual iron sulfate into iron (II) carbonate. He said a lot of the iron (II) sulfate had oxidized to iron (III), but I’m not sure if this was caused by the alkalization. The sludge settled somewhat during the night, so he siphoned off some sodium sulfate supernatant, starting the siphon with a syringe. Gravity filtration through cotton balls in plastic water bottles over two weeks concentrated the sludge somewhat, draining his soul. Then he oxidized it from Cr(III) to Cr(VI) with 760g of calcium hypochlorite. Vacuum filtration for four hours was able to separate the precipitated iron hydroxide, leaving a urine-like calcium [mono]chromate solution, which he boiled down for another week, periodically filtering out the precipitated chromate crystals. For disposal, he reduced the contaminated waste chromate with sodium sulfite in a hydrochloric acid catalyst. A reaction with more H₂SO₄ converted his yield of 62.5g of calcium chromate dihydrate to dichromate, precipitating out all the calcium as sulfate. To finally switch it to K₂Cr₂O₇ he added potassium carbonate, expecting a CaCO₃ precipitate, but what he actually had was dichromic acid at that point. He neutralized it with KOH and boiled it down further and did more vacuum filtrations to crystallize 40g of K₂Cr₂O₇, a 12% yield.
on 02024-08-28#video #toread of #bootstrapping #manufacturing potassium permanganate from 40g MnO₂, 55g KOH, 30g KNO₃, 5.5% NaOCl, and 31% HCl #materials #scouting
on 02024-08-27#video of #NurdRage making chloroplatinic acid #materials #bootstrapping #scouting
on 02024-08-27#video of #manufacturing #woodworking tools by #3D-printing: templates for a router, an air guide for a router vacuum cleaner, a T-square with holes at 1-mm increments for drawing parallel to an edge (printing the first layer in a contrasting color), screw pattern guides for particular hinges, a drill guide for putting your Forstner bit the right distance from the edge of a plywood panel, a clamp with a rather oversized screw thread, and a scribing tool for transferring the outline of a wall onto the edge of a board you want to cut. #bootstrapping #scouting
on 02024-08-20#video about #bootstrapping a spot-welder from a 1.5V battery? #clickbait He’s extracting the carbon rod from a carbon-zinc battery (“Rabbit” brand, which is maybe a Vietnamese thing?) and then uses like a 12-volt scooter battery or something? His bottle of 28% sulfuric acid is labeled in Vietnamese; he uses it to corrode some of the peeled-off battery casing, producing hydrogen bubbles, and perhaps to clean the carbon. He sands the surface of the carbon electrode, maybe to bring it to a point. He uses some leftover copper pipe as an electrode holder, piercing the electrode end of it with a drill for some reason, after “center-punching” it with a nail. Then he mounts the copper electrode holder in a bamboo handle. A little more drill action on the non-electrode end, drilling at an angle through the pipe end, and he can insert a wire, fold it over, twist it around, and hold it in place with the bamboo. He strips his wires with a box cutter, rolling the wire along the blade. He crimps on his large alligator clips with diagonal cutters. His power source for the spot welder is the 36V rechargeable battery from his cordless drill! A couple of pieces of steel wire stuck into its terminals can be connected to the alligator clips. The carbon can draw an arc from the other alligator clip. Before spot welding, he cleans the surface with the sulfuric on a Q-tip. He feeds some twisted steel (or solder?) wire into the arc in order to make the weld, blowing out the carbon when it catches on fire. The sulfuric seems to be his only flux, and he’s welding on stainless, so his penetration is terrible. This battery DC arc welding is very quiet, though, with just the hiss of an arc. After a few minutes of such welding, the battery seems to be dead. A rat-tail file cleans up some of the worst of the weld.
on 02024-07-24#video about #bootstrapping silicone #materials from 40mℓ of sodium silicate (modulus and concentration unspecified but it looks syrupy) and 10mℓ of 95% ethanol, which he claims ethylates the silicate chains. Then he squeezes the water out of it. The resulting silicone is super bouncy, much more rigid than polydimethylsiloxane. Very impressive. By #Apoptosis.
on 02024-07-10#video by #NileRed explaining the Tollens silvering process. His Tollens reagent recipe is 17g silver nitrate (homemade), 2.4g soda lye, and 9mℓ concentrated ammonia: 1ℓ 0.1M AgNO₃, gravity filtration through three or four coffee filters, measure off 150mℓ, add 9mℓ ammonia solution, which with stirring soon complexes away the precipitated silver oxide into the desired diamminesilver complex; then dumps in the 2.4g of lye, and on stirring again the silver oxide precipitated dissolves. Warns of the danger of degradation to silver nitride if not used immediately, which gave some brown discoloration after a few minutes. For the mirror demonstration he shakes this at room temperature for several minutes with 1g dextrose, suggesting that a hot water bath would accelerate it. #materials #bootstrapping
on 02024-07-02#electroplating bath #materials recipe: 5% vinegar, 3% hydrogen peroxide, mixed half and half, heated in the microwave until it steams, used to oxidize a copper scouring pad to copper acetate, but don’t let the solution get too concentrated, and apply a minimum of ½V. #electrolysis #bootstrapping
on 02024-07-01#video reducing boria powder to metallic boron with magnesium powder, igniting the mix with a butane hand torch after magnesium ribbon failed. Seems to be Polish. I feel like he didn’t do a good enough job of neutralizing the magnesia and probably had a bunch in his final product. That still doesn’t quite explain the 316% yield. #materials #bootstrapping
on 02024-06-26#NurdRage #video on #bootstrapping H₂SO₄ by blowing SO₂ onto a CuCl₂ solution, which oxidizes it the same way it oxidizes PCB copper, precipitating CuCl and also producing HCl as a waste product. Then you can reoxidize the CuCl with air before switching back to SO₂. He also mentions he made a previous video using H₂O₂ to do the oxidation. #materials #scouting
on 02024-06-26another #video on #bootstrapping H₂SO₄ with oxalate and blue vitriol. #materials #scouting Deleted “for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines”. #censorship
on 02024-06-26#bootstrapping H₂SO₄, which is apparently illegal in the #EU, but starting from the dilute stuff. #materials #video #politics #tutorial
on 02024-06-26#video #toread about #bootstrapping woodworking tools
on 02024-06-25#NurdRage #video on #bootstrapping H₂SO₄ from oxalic acid (dihydrate) and ferrous sulfate (heptahydrate), and the sun, with 46–67% yield. It’s very surprising to me that this precipitates iron oxalate. He boiled down the resulting acid until the remaining sulfate started to crystallize, then distilled it to 70% of nice, colorless acid. Using more oxalic acid he got 57% yield, and by leaving the defecation beaker in the sun for eight hours to reduce ferric ions, releasing CO₂, boosting the yield to 67%. An attempt with MgSO₄ only gave 2% yield. An attempt with blue vitriol generated a precipitate too fine to filter (maybe because he added the oxalic acid too fast). He says it even works for HNO₃. #materials #scouting
on 02024-06-25#video about #bootstrapping H₂SO₄ from alabaster #materials #scouting labeled as “satire”. He’s going using washing soda for this, which initially made me think it actually was satire, but thinking about it more, it sort of makes sense: calcite is far less water-soluble than alabaster (and he gets something like 50% yield on the calcite, proving it’s calcite with vinegar). But then don’t we just get sodium sulfate (already very useful for #energy-storage phase-change materials, but not the objective)? A water-soluble sulfate is progress, I guess. He converted most of his bicarb into washing soda first, but that seems like an unnecessary step, just convenient to reduce foaming. Then he electrolyzes it at 13.12 volts and 220mA in a hot-glued-together two-chamber cell with some kind of membrane or salt bridge in the middle, using a postage-stamp-sized iron anode (!!) in the chamber of initially almost pure water and a copper chain for the cathode. His objective with the iron anode is to precipitate out the remaining carbonate. Because the current is going up, he infers that soluble iron sulfate is being formed, although sodium sulfate leaking through his salt bridge (?) would be an alternative explanation. After five hours there was a lot of green/black sludge in the anode chamber; from the greenness he infers that the iron has precipitated all the carbonate. Then he runs it through a second electrolysis using a graphite anode, which nevertheless dissolved (I feel that lead would be a better ghetto choice) and electroplated his copper with iron, which is surprising given the presumably low pH. Then he puts it under UV light in a tiny aluminum-foil chamber, which he says is to ensure no remaining SO₃ molecules. No pH or specific gravity measurement.
on 02024-06-25another #video about attempting #bootstrapping H₂SO₄ from sulfur #materials #scouting #toread
on 02024-06-25#ScrapScience #video on #bootstrapping HNO₃ #materials from KNO₃ using a terracotta flowerpot as an #electrolysis membrane with the drainage hole plugged with silicone, incorrectly described as a “semipermeable membrane”, in an HDPE container made from cutting the bottom off a plastic milk bottle. Copper cathode made from thick wire, graphite anode made from some round graphite bars. 100g KNO₃, unknown quantity of water (maybe 500mℓ), some distilled water added to the anode chamber. Initially he gets 90mA at 7.5V (=80Ω), but pretty soon that rises to 630mA (≈12Ω), and he limited the current to 1.02A. No hydrogen is generated at the cathode, surprising him, but he says it’s because the nitrate ions are reduced to ammonium. After about a day the graphite anode has been completely eaten, which makes me think it wasn’t really graphite, but like carbon arc gouging electrodes or something. The cathode compartment ended up being very basic and smelling very strongly of ammonia, so he made ammonia too. He says his crude titration (not shown) tests the acid at 0.7 molar, which apparently isn’t enough to attack copper, so he boils it with some copper in it, eventually dissolving the copper after boiling it down 4×. While this method does seem to work, it seems a little bit like a method of making an engine starting with only a car — the cheapest way to get KNO₃ is by neutralizing HNO₃ with KOH. He also thinks it “isn’t good enough to be practical” because of how dilute the product is.
on 02024-06-25#CodysLab #video on #bootstrapping H₂SO₄ #materials with the chamber process. He gets 20mℓ. #scouting
on 02024-06-25#video #toread about purifying acetone. #bootstrapping #materials
on 02024-06-20#ElAngelito #video on #electrolysis sharpening of steel wires in a stainless steel sugar bowl with a saturated table salt solution. He’s using an inverter arc welder as his power supply set at the lowest amperage. He got thick fencing wire to sharpen to a point in three or four minutes of holding it in the salt water. #materials #manufacturing #bootstrapping
on 02024-06-1001950s #video of how an oil refinery works, demonstrating fractional distillation, vacuum distillation, cat cracking with fluidized-bed silica/alumina sponge, catalytic reforming with platinum supported on sapphire to raise octane, etc. #materials #bootstrapping #scouting
on 02024-05-26#bootstrapping #machining and #manufacturing with a milling machine made of granite for #precision, the "RIG-CNC"
on 02024-05-21the following #Blondihacks column on Hackaday is in /category/hackaday-columns/page/392/ and is from a month later. It explains that “there are parts in all machine tools that (arguably) only lathes can make”, which is why Gingery starts #bootstrapping #machining with one. Well, after metal casting. And it explains that, when turning between centers, the lathe is only imprecise in two dimensions instead of three. That seems like it’s on the right track to why it’s useful for bootstrapping #precision #machining but not a fully adequate explanation. Searching for further columns in /category/hackaday-columns yields no results up to June, which is where I gave up.
on 02024-05-20#Blondihacks explains the #bootstrapping of #manufacturing #precision in #machining: #history (Vaucanson, Maudslay, Andrey Nartov), and promises a series of articles covering the topic comprehensively. But that was six years ago.
on 02024-05-20#Fraser makes a more powerful blow-tube lamp for glassworking #bootstrapping #video #toread
on 02024-05-18#HTME #video on #bootstrapping rubber #materials from wildflowers, specifically native Minnesota goldenrod. Dried, pulverized in a blender, Soxhlet (?) reflux extraction of unwanted compounds with acetone, then solvent extraction of polyisoprene in toluene. For scaling up, improvised a reflux apparatus out of paint cans, glass tubes, and silicone caulk. Got about 3% of the mass of the dried leaves as rubber goo. Then they vulcanized the raw rubber with sulfur in a toaster oven.
on 02024-05-0110-person US$10 10-minute temporary cabin from pallet wrap. They delimbed some trees and wrapped pallet wrap around them, then I guess delimbed and lashed together some saplings (with pallet wrap!) to form gables and put pallet wrap on that too to keep the rain out. They have a nifty folding bow saw, but all the time to delimb the trees with the saw and axes is not included in the 10 minutes, and looks like it was more like three or four hours. Lashing with pallet wrap is a nice idea, giving the appearance of things being connected by spiderwebs, though it was completely unnecessary to do most of it while standing on a stepladder; they could have lashed things together on the ground and then lifted them into place. Even after doing all the delimbing ahead of time, and working in a pine forest planted in neat rows for logging, it took them over 30 minutes and about a roll and a half of pallet wrap, and they didn’t have a door yet, and wind blew under the walls until they piled up pine needles, and it was big enough to sleep maybe four or five people. Adding a door involved a “zip wall system”, basically a long zipper with sticky tape on it which they stuck on one side of the plastic wrap and magically opened, like the door the girl draws in Pan’s Labyrinth. Stretching pallet wrap over a log frame makes a soft cot top, which they then supported on logs. They showed another plastic-wrap cabin nearby that was a year and a half old which looked pretty intact. #video #clickbait #bootstrapping
on 02024-04-06#bootstrapping a DIY digging auger from a circular saw blade, some allthread, and an electric drill. And a MIG welder, and a vise, and some nuts, and an angle grinder of course. #video with shitty elevator music. Jesus, they’re using a brand-new carbide-tipped saw blade for this, max 9000 rpm. I can’t read Polish well enough to tell if it’s designed for cutting steel, but I suspect it just says it’s made of steel. Jesus, has this guy never heard of intermittent welding? Because he’s just holding his improvised auger onto his allthread with a jam nut, not even a little bitty weld. In a minute and a half he digs 300mm deep in the garden, okay.
on 02024-04-06top 10 tools to make with #3D-printing #video #bootstrapping by #Zack-Freedman: a mouse bungee to retract your mouse cord, a USB cable holder, some kind of camera holding thing, battery-holding inserts for an Altoids tin (to contain lithium-ion fires), a tiny shelving unit for Altoids tins, a screw sorting jig, a folding filament spool for a 3-D printer, a three-inch-long skateboard, a 3-D printing filament spool support, a solder paste dispenser, and a Dremel bit organizer. Pretty lame and disappointing overall.
on 02024-04-06#video #toread on cooking in “wild” clay #ceramics #bootstrapping
on 02024-04-06#manufacturing an LCD #hardware #video #bootstrapping #toread
on 02024-04-05#Primitive-Technology natural-draft iron smelt #materials #bushcraft #bootstrapping #video with a 1.5-meter-tall 250mm-inside-diameter mud furnace built over the course of a week with four or eight tuyeres; only got a few grams of iron
on 02024-04-05#PDF #paper from 02016 by Tomes and Finlayson: #bootstrapping an integrating sphere for #optics measurements; they painted it with barium sulfate suspended in PVA glue thinned in water for spraying, with five wet-on-wet coats followed by 10–15 (??) dry dust coats, getting 90–95% reflectance and a flatter spectrum than titanium dioxide, comparable to commercial Avian-B.
on 02024-04-05#Fraser building a lampwork blowtorch #bootstrapping #manufacturing #video shows different oil lamp designs. He’s going to use a bellows and a check valve with a balloon reservoir I guess? Sort of like a pneumatic buck converter. Probably doesn’t have a bladder to use. Before he gets into #glassworking he demonstrates soldering copper with it. He’s using a check valve explained by Faraday, using a latex diaphragm similar to a bicycle Dunlop valve, though Faraday used cloth. He decided to use an (99% isopropyl) alcohol lamp instead of an oil lamp to get higher power and less smoke. On the fifth attempt he succeeded at sealing a test tube into a Hermetically sealed ampoule.
on 02024-04-05“Amazing” #hardware Projects From Old Scrap Circuit Boards. Fake, removing components from salvage boards with tweezers without desoldering them. First project is an uncredited, unexplained Joule Thief cellphone charger that produces too-high unregulated output voltage (one commenter said, “When I plugged this into my phone everything blew up.”). Second one is a shitty high-distortion class-A darlington amp for an 8Ω paper cone speaker consisting of two NPN power transistors from a compact fluorescent lightbulb, a 220μF cap, and a 330Ω resistor. Still, he’s doing some cool #ghettobotics stuff with almost no materials or tools. By “Creative Goutam.” #bootstrapping #hoarding #video
on 02024-04-05#Bushcraft Filipino guy smelting iron into a fishhook #bootstrapping #video
on 02024-04-05how to make a quill pin and draw with it, including tempering feathers etc. #bootstrapping #video
on 02024-04-05#video from 02015 by "fullspectrumtechnician3798" on salvaging #microcontrollers for #hardware #electronics projects. Socketed DIPs are easiest to remove from the equipment. Old computer printer boards are one of his examples; he exhibits one with an UV-erasable 8748, which you can also “enable the external access” (I think this is pulling the EA pin high, maybe pin 7) to make it run a program from external ROM/RAM. He also exhibits what looks like a Packard Bell full-length ISA hard drive controller, saying, “normal Winchester drive controllers, pretty much all of them will have either an 8048 or 49 or 8051, usually...labeled, like, Winchester, something like WD1015.” He demonstrates one thus salvaged and hooked up to an external EPROM. Then he exhibits a full-height 5¼ IDE hard drive, saying they usually have an 8051, but this time he’s pointing to something like a PLCC. Then he exhibits an ISA modem card, which he says pretty much always has a microcontroller. He says the Winbond 78C31B on that modem is an 8051 (and therefore also has EA). “Some network cards like this old [ISA] LANTastic have a Zigalog Z80... luckily the serial chip, the RAM, and the CPU are all socketed.” Then he exhibits an old (01980s) UPS control board with a Philips 87C52E socketed DIP, which is another 8051. He says the MC6800 series is also useful even if preprogrammed, by using the “special functions” pins (?) to “tell them to boot off of an external ROM”. Though the one he shows is UV-erasable. Holding up a PLCC chip, he says hard drives, especially Western Digital, use the Intel 80C196 style, which is 16-bit but still has the “external access” pin. And he says keyboards often use the NEC D8048-8C, which is of course an 8048. #bootstrapping #hoarding #video #scouting
on 02024-04-05salvaging motors from floppy disk drives #hardware #bootstrapping #hoarding #video He doesn’t manage to nondestructively disassemble these NEC floppy drives; he suggests making a nut for their leadscrews by twisting some wire, which seems like it ought to work. Rather than trying to use the flat-flex cables, he solders directly to the motor pins. Demonstrates crimping Dupont pins onto the wires he soldered onto the motor. Then he wires them up to a couple of DRV8825 stepper driver chips and an #STM32 Blue Pill. Running them on 9 volts with a 100% duty cycle they got up to 90° (according to his thermocouple) and started to smell, for which he suggests using a different driver board called the “EasyDriver”. He uses Arduino’s LiquidCrystal_I2C.h to talk to his 16×2 LCD.
on 02024-04-05#bootstrapping a plasma cutting machine from scrap (if your scrap includes an old welder and a humongous full-bridge rectifier etc.) #video of this Italian guy kludging all kinds of crazy things together, building a giant high-current inductor, etc. Also he starts with a plasma torch.
on 02024-04-04bushcraft camping with coyotes & hunting my dinner #bootstrapping #video #toread
on 02024-04-04#bootstrapping a handheld metal smith’s forge (but you can’t hold it while you’re using it) #manufacturing #video #toread
on 02024-04-04DIY betavoltaics #bootstrapping #video Chinese Betavolt Corp. is using diamond semiconductors; their BV100 produces 100μW at 3V for 50 years from nickel-63, package size 15mm × 15mm × 5mm. So Robert Murray-Smith decided to make his own out of an americium smoke alarm (1 microcurie, 37kBq, 0.3μg, working out to 6 femtoamps, with half-life of 432 years, since it’s isotope 241) and a 2N3055 TO-3 power transistor. He measures 130mV of alphavoltaic production from his decapped 2N3055 but doesn’t measure the current, but presumably it would be on the order of half a femtowatt. NurdRage’s tritium-keychain-powered solar cells (being commercialized by Arkenlight as Betalight) are much more practical, but shorter-lived.
on 02024-04-04#Andy-Ward on how to “make” clay. #ceramics #video #toread #bootstrapping
on 02024-04-03#Andy-Ward #manufacturing an earthen oil lamp #bootstrapping #ceramics #video #toread
on 02024-04-03#Andy-Ward #bootstrapping #ceramics into #manufacturing a mug #video #toread
on 02024-04-03#manufacturing soap from wood ash and fat #bootstrapping #video #toread
on 02024-04-03#manufacturing a very nice basket from pine needles and thread #bootstrapping #video #toread
on 02024-04-03a US$100 backyard raku gas kiln from ceramic fiber, not counting the cost of the weed-burner torch or the zirconia kiln shelf (discarded by a pottery studio). Interesting note, he sewed the ceramic-fiber roll onto the oil-drum walls with stainless steel wire, but suggests that nichrome would last longer. #ceramics #bootstrapping #video
on 02024-04-03#Fraser builds an 800-year-old blowtorch or "blow lamp" design: a terracotta #ceramics oil lamp, sealed by being cooked in milk and then coated in linseed oil, blown with a copper mouth blowpipe. It works to solder copper wire. He built two separate wicks onto his oil lamp so he can light the larger wick when he wants more power, and eventually used a 3-D printer hotend for the blowing aperture. He recommends T.P. Danger’s 19th-century book “Art of Glassblowing” for lampwork and scientific glassblowing information. And of course one way to make a blowpipe is by glassblowing. #bootstrapping #video #manufacturing
on 02024-04-03distilling H₂SO₄. #materials #manufacturing #video recommends taping joints with teflon which can withstand the stuff at its 336° boiling point, using a stirring hotplate to eliminate bumping (boiling chips weren’t enough), using a short-path distillation apparatus, and putting the whole apparatus in a polypropylene bin (which will melt from the heat if there's a spill, but give you a few seconds to get away). He suggests sand or cat litter in the bin would contain it better. He uses differences in refractive index to detect when the new distillate is the same density as the stuff in the receiving vial. #bootstrapping
on 02024-04-03how to render and purify tallow #toread #bootstrapping #video
on 02024-04-03#Andy-Ward sealing and cooking in unglazed earthenware #ceramics #bootstrapping #toread #video
on 02024-04-03#TKOR firing #ceramics on a barbecue grill #bootstrapping #toread #video
on 02024-04-03#Nighthawk 6 uses for a 90% medical oxygen concentrator, mostly fireworks like senko hanabi, but also using steel brake lines for poor thermic lances and an oxypropane torch, and finally a macaroni rocket/thermic lance. #hoarding #bootstrapping
on 02024-04-03producing #cooling from my pee by reacting with Birkeland–Eyde nitric acid #video #bootstrapping #materials
on 02024-04-03#Primitive-Technology #bootstrapping fired-brick hut #materials #video #bushcraft
on 02024-04-03#HTME #bootstrapping Roman concrete #materials #video; he’s using pumice from the Black Rock Desert volcanic field and pumicite (?) from a mine in California for his pozzolan. He clearly doesn’t know how to make concrete; he’s using smooth river rocks and no sand for his aggregate. Although he does use sand in his lime mortar, his cob, and presumably his modern concrete mix! Also somehow his fired clay bricks were only barely stronger in compression than his cob bricks.
on 02024-04-03#Nighthawk DIY solar thermal panels #bootstrapping #energy #video #toread
on 02024-04-03#bootstrapping foxhole radio #hardware #video sucks, clueless, not worth watching
on 02024-04-03decarbonating bicarbonate into carbonate #materials and then recrystallizing them. #bootstrapping #video
on 02024-04-03extracting sulfur from pyrite #materials #bootstrapping #video #toread. Ugh, now the video’s been taken private! #censorship
on 02024-04-03how to purify acetone #materials #bootstrapping #video #toread
on 02024-04-03problems with contaminated acetone #materials #bootstrapping #video. Explains the systematic nomenclature with butanone, dimethylketone, aldehydes, etc. Then he does a fractional distillation to compare Spanish brands. Leroy Merlin acetone, which he describes as “caca de la vaca”, has at least 4% contaminants. Brico Depot had reasonably good quality. Also the paint store next to his house. Misogynist jokes.
on 02024-04-03extracting iodine from povidone iodine #materials #bootstrapping #video #toread
on 02024-04-03#3D-printing a fractal ball vise. #manufacturing #bootstrapping #video He fills the ball with scrap steel as aggregate in concrete to make it heavier and I guess more massive for hammering. Basically it’s a weighted concrete near-sphere with a PLA skin resting on a rubber O-ring on a concrete base.
on 02024-04-03#3D-printing and #electroplating #tutorial with graphite. He’s using an LCD SLA printer to get nice smooth prints and graphite spray paint, but shows that some graphite paints are not compatible with some automotive body work putties, because the paint cracks. He’s measuring 12.5kΩ between points a few centimeters apart, which is similar to what I get with a pencil on paper, but after he burnishes it with a towel, he gets only 5kΩ. To burnish his Benchy he tumbles it in walnut shells for four hours. He uses an unspecified commercial bright acid copper electrolyte for the initial plating, using coffee filters for the anode bags on his copper anodes. He recommends using a constant-current power supply with 1A/dm² while rotating the workpiece, but he suggests also using the voltage (0.6–1.0V) to tell if your current setting is right! He gets a lovely mirror finish with his trade-secret electrolyte composition, but then sands and buffs it. Before plating gold, nickel, or silver over the copper, he suggests galvanic degreasing, using a stainless steel anode and 6V; he applies gold with a galvanic brush (electrolyte not disclosed) and 6 volts. #manufacturing #bootstrapping #video #electrolysis
on 02024-04-03#3D-printing a casting pattern, the quick and dirty way, using a Prusa I3 MK3S FDM printer, using a plastic called PVB, brand #Polycast, “designed to burn out very cleanly”. Dude is wearing my slogan. Lots of time-wasting talking-head footage. He also mentions you can smooth the prints with isopropanol, and that he was able to glue it that way too. He brushed plaster on the surface of his print so he wouldn’t have to degas his plaster. He recommends casting in Zamak, which he melts in a soup can, rather than aluminum, and using hardware store ductwork sealed with aluminum HVAC tape to hold the plaster. To my surprise he claims Zamak is cheaper than aluminum, and that most plumbing fixtures and towel racks are Zamak, both of which I think are wrong. #manufacturing #bootstrapping #video
on 02024-04-03#Integza DIY metal #3D-printing by strapping a MIG welder to his FDM printer. He did, surprisingly, get it to work to some extent. #bootstrapping #video
on 02024-04-03DIY metal #3D-printing (SLM of 316 stainless) #bootstrapping with a 155-watt #laser coupled in through a fiber running at up to 300mm/s, getting better results at higher speeds and higher powers. Wow, I had no idea that surface tension gradient with temperature was a thing, but apparently you can reverse it by adding sulfur to stainless, resulting in a reversal of Marangoni convection! Eventually his 3-D printed ASA lens housing overheated and hazed his lens and fiber. #materials #video
on 02024-04-03recycling auto parts #hoarding #bootstrapping. Basically just explaining what a junkyard is with stock junkyard footage. Suggests using the junkyard to practice removing parts from vehicles. Worthless #video but at least it’s short?
on 02024-04-03salvaging parts from old computers. #hoarding #bootstrapping #video disassembles DVD drive, rescues motors, etc. He doesn’t like brushless. Does like the ground rods, the magnets in the laser head, some parts of the power supply (heatsinks, power electronics attached to them (mostly diodes but some power transistors), inductors, and large or weird caps, AC sockets, fans), etc.
on 02024-04-03DIY a laser projector from a hard drive to display messages 30 meters away. #hoarding #bootstrapping #video It looks like he mounted 12 mirrors at different angles around the outside of the platters, then used them to deflect a largish green laser diode, but had a lot of trouble with timing jitter anyway, maybe because he's using optointerruptors to directly generate the timing signal and interrupt his Arduino and the optointerruptors have some jitter, or maybe because he’s doing serial port communications at the same time. His first version using a 5mW red laser diode was not as bright as he wanted and only had 8 lines of vertical resolution, so he upped it to 12 and switched to a 120mW 532nm DPSS green laser from eBay. He suffered a lot from PLA creeping under stress, which kept throwing his mirrors out of alignment. Also DPSS turns out to be bad for rapid modulation, so he switched to a 700mW 520nm laser diode, and he added a bleeder resistor to keep the laser from ever turning all the way off so it would be faster. He doesn’t know the AVR video generation tricks that let you use the SPI interface to pump out 8 million pixels a second, so he’s suffering from only being able to do 1 million.
on 02024-04-03#Madman salvaging a washing machine motor for a belt sander, using mostly a MIG welder, a vise, a hand file, a drill (without a drill press, but with a redoubtable selection of holesaws), a hydraulic press, and an angle grinder. As an anvil he has a section of railroad track. It took him a month and a half. #bootstrapping #hoarding #video
on 02024-04-03#EEVblog salvaging parts from #inkjet printers (HP Officejet Pro 8710) to reuse; specifically the power supply (32V at 1095mA or, in sleep mode, 12V at 170mA), four conveniently mounted infrared photosensors, ferrite beads, coin cells, through-hole inductors, a relay, high-voltage suppression caps, a surface-mount pulse transformer for power supply feedback, an LCD screen with flat-flex cable and IR LEDs around it for the IR touchscreen, linear scanning array (CCD?), dc motor with relative optical encoder, linear rod for the carriage, lots of T10 Torx screws, four more dc motors (the head drive motor being a large 20-watt Mabuchi RS-645VA-24135, the third being in the ink sump pump, and the fourth being the paper advance motor with a 600-count optical encoder disc), optical encoder grating tape, speaker, springs. Says there’s nothing of value in the paper tray and that the plastic is nonreusable, so in summary it’s “not worth your time”. #hoarding #bootstrapping #video
on 02024-04-03#TPAI salvaging parts from printers and scanners to reuse. #hoarding #bootstrapping #video very slow paced. From an HP inkjet/scanner combo he salvages a paper cone speaker, a switchmode power supply, the paper feed photointerruptor optical encoder (with a bit of abuse to the transparent plastic disc), the paper feed dc motor, the carriage dc motor (including its wiring harness), the precision ground carriage rails, the carriage drive toothed belt, the photointerruptor tape from the carriage encoder, numerous springs, the sump pump dc motor with its photointerruptor encoder, lots of plastic gears, the paper feed platen axle and another paper feed roller axle, the scanner bed glass, the scanner drive stepper motor, the CCFL power supply, the cold-cathode fluorescent lamp itself, three mirror-glass strips, and the scanner lens. It looks like he was going to make a followup video but never did (this was ten years ago).
on 02024-04-03#TPAI salvaging parts from dishwashers to reuse. The interior is stainless! And he salvages thermal cutouts, water heating elements, a 16-amp 240-volt relay, a capacitor, the power switch, a pressure switch, a shaded-pole induction fan, a 30-watt “extrusion pump” to move water, some smaller relays, a bunch of power electronics (including seven triacs), a rotary switch, an EEPROM, some opamps, some darlington array drivers, a thermistor encapsulated in stainless steel, an electromechanical valve (“Aquastop”), a styrofoam float microswitch, the giant induction-motor-driven dishwasher circulating pump (the single-phase type with a start capacitor), and a Mitsubishi M38027M8 8-bit microcontroller. #hoarding #bootstrapping #video #scouting
on 02024-04-03coppiced willow for living fences, weaving baskets, feeding goats, etc. #bootstrapping #video
on 02024-04-03#manufacturing acetone #materials from eggs by eating the shell with vinegar to make INS 263 and then dry-distilling it. He says he got 20% yield. He started by cooking the shells to burn up the organics, but not really enough, so he only succeeded in charring them, which he regrets and doesn’t recommend; it made the whole process smell unbelievably terrible until he removed the waste products. After weeks of digestion in vinegar, he added activated charcoal from a water filter in the middle, decanted it, strained it through a screen, filtered it through a cotton ball, and got a brownish transparent solution. After a second decantation step he let it dry for a few more weeks to crystallize acetate crystals in bizarre hollow cauliflower shapes. I think he probably could have purified it a bit at this stage by only doing a partial crystallization, but he let it dry completely. Then it rehydrated from the air and became soft, no longer stinking of burnt corpse. He says it requires about 400° to decompose, not 160° as Wikipedia says, so he had to switch from his hotplate to a heating mantle he made from plaster and a hair dryer heating element, which burned out immediately, so he made another one. The distillation then produced a flammable orange liquid, probably mostly acetone. Naturally his shitty plaster heating mantle started crumbling. Perhaps he wasn’t cooling his distillation enough, because he lost a lot of white vapor, though he says it was side products. Because the heating mantle reached red heat, his borosilicate round-bottom flask melted somewhat, cracked from the temperature gradient, and melted some holes in the bottom. As a replacement distillation vessel, he drilled an empty butane cylinder (underwater to keep the drillbit cool and prevent air from contacting any potential sparks), filled it with water to drive out the butane, then drilled bigger holes and used it as his dry distillation flask. To purify the orange acetone, he started with fractional distillation, getting a light yellow acetone. Cleaning the distillation flask was very difficult, requiring not just a base bath but sanding. For a second fractional distillation of the yellow stuff he used a hotplate oil bath and 500mm of distillation column, wrapped in aluminum foil, obtaining almost colorless acetone. A third fractional distillation removed the remaining color, but it still smelled burnt. So naturally he refluxed the acetone with a giant quantity of KMnO₄ for 15–20 hours, then did another fractional distillation to get the acetone back out, at long last eliminating the burnt stench. Then he tried another purification with aqueous silver nitrate and sodium hydroxide as recommended in Vogel’s “Text-Book of Practical Organic Chemistry”, third edition, leaving a black gunk in his flask which had to be cleaned with nitric acid. Another fractional distillation removed most of the water, and finally calcium sulfate hemihydrate removed the remaining water, though not before he broke his hotplate and his camping stove trying to dry the sulfate. An additional distillation separates the dry acetone from the plaster. Then to try to get the yield above 20% he tried re-purifying some of the fractions discarded during the various distillations with the silver-oxide method mentioned earlier, followed by KMnO₄, at which point he regretted adding so much at once, because the acetone started boiling from the reaction before he could dunk the erlenmeyer in a water bath, at which point he gave up. #bootstrapping #video
on 02024-04-03#HTME #bootstrapping H₂SO₄. There’s a natural source in Yellowstone which he didn’t use; instead he used sulfur collected from an old sulfur mine in Death Valley which exploded in 01953. He planted red cabbage in raised beds earlier to make anthocyanin as an indicator (but also used commercially made four-dye pH test strips). He tried dry distillation of blue vitriol and green vitriol to get H₂SO₃ (pH 5–6) and then waits (the dry distillation took weeks). For the dry distillation he cheated by making a still out of steel pipe, because this was shortly after the workshop fire. Then he boiled it down to get a pH of 2. But even at a pH of 0.5, industrially produced H₂SO₄ doesn’t dissolve chicken wings, though it does at pH -1.27. Heating pyrite in water to oxidize it reached a pH of 3 after several years. #materials #video
on 02024-04-03#HTME on #bootstrapping batteries and generators, with reference to Dr. Stone. He doesn’t know about current or that the homopolar generator he built can supply a massive current. #video
on 02024-04-03#HTME on #bootstrapping #hardware. #video
on 02024-04-03#Andy-Ward on #bootstrapping clay for #ceramics from dirt, part 2. Recommends looking for “crackle texture” on the surface to locate dirt with a high clay content, then feeling for hard lumps. Later screen the clay to remove large particles, then paint strainer bags for removing silt, and levigation if that’s insufficient. #scouting #video
on 02024-04-03now you can docker run -it stagex/stage0 to test #stage0 #bootstrapping; stage0s/live-bootstrap is supposed to be a drop-in replacement for Alpine as a basis for #Docker container images. Lance R. Vick says they are “adding support for podman next, then buildah, kaniko etc.”
86-DOS (aka QDOS, #MS-DOS) #bootstrapping in 01980, with early disk images (0.11 and 0.34). “COMMAND.COM, SYS, the RDCPM utility, plus the SCP development tools: EDLIN, ASM, TRANS, and HEX2BIN. There is no DEBUG yet, but there is a chess program of unknown provenance.” Also 0.34 includes AARGH, DAMN!, and SHIT commands. #history
on 02024-01-14a #RepRap that vacuum-deposits metal #bootstrapping
on 02023-11-26the patches needed to port the #musl C library to the #Fiwix kernel and #tcc for #bootstrapping
on 02023-10-08stepping you through #bootstrapping #stage0 through #asm from hex machine code.
on 02023-07-13a C compiler compiled into the λ-calculus. #bootstrapping #compilers
on 02022-10-12making gesso #bootstrapping
on 02022-10-12"QSCM", a smooth blend of Scheme and C (a minimal Lisp that compiles to C) #smallisbeautiful #bootstrapping
on 02022-05-21Jeremiah Orians’s notes from talks on #bootstrapping or #unbootstrapping
on 02022-05-21#bootstrapping Linux from source (work in progress): all the parts in the bootstrapping chain
on 02021-12-01"Selfie" #bootstrapping #RISC-V
on 02021-02-09#ebook about #Selfie, the #bootstrapping system that emulates a subset of #RISC-V and compiles itself from a subset of #C and has a #SAT #solver for bounded model checking
on 02021-02-09another #interview with #100-Rabbits Devine Lu Linvega. #bootstrapping
on 02021-02-09"100 Rabbits" homepage #bootstrapping
on 02021-02-09another #interview with Devine Lu Linvega from #100-Rabbits going deep into the #Orca #livecoding #esolang. #bootstrapping #toread
on 02021-02-09#interview by Daniel Temkin about the #Orca #esolang, a two-dimensional ASCII language for #livecoding #music, by #100-Rabbits Devine Lu Linvega and Rekka Bell(um?), who live on a solar-powered sailboat called Pino and created a conworld called the Neauismetica. Talks a lot about #Fractran. “#Lisp is a slippery slope that leads inevitably to #Forth.”. #bootstrapping #cc by
on 02021-02-09#video on Sandland, where they dig underground tunnels through sandstone in #Wisconsin. #bootstrapping #mining
on 02021-01-18Planckforth is a #smallisbeautiful #bootstrapping #Forth bootstrapped from a handwritten 1KB ELF binary. #source-code
on 02021-01-15Traditional #qualitative-analysis of inorganic #materials, now only of pedagogical use (well, and #bootstrapping maybe)
on 02020-11-12Jeremiah Orians’s "Knight" #virtual-machine (really a forgotten minicomputer design from the 01970s) is a couple of orders more complex than simple virtual machines like Chifir, the Cult of the Bound Variable, or Wirth’s RISC. #bootstrapping
on 02020-06-20a tiny self-contained Unix-like OS, C-subset compiler, and CPU emulator. #bootstrapping #smallisbeautiful
on 02017-05-09The #LGP-30, selling for US$47000 in 1956, was one of the first computers designed for a single person; it used a drum memory (with some tracks used as delay lines for its registers) and was bit-serial, with 15 flip-flops, 113 vacuum tubes, and 1450 diodes. Its logic design is fully documented in its hardware manual on Bitsavers. It’s famous as the computer from The Story of Mel. #hardware #history #smallisbeautiful #bootstrapping
on 02017-03-22#CodysLab #mining episode where he finds (possibly) silver ore in his mine, demonstrates drilling rock and blasting using a gasoline generator, and sets up a photovoltaic-powered LED array (a perversely inefficient means of illumination) for indoor growing of peas and whatnot. #bootstrapping
on 02016-10-10#CodysLab #video where he oxidizes aluminum with lye with a teakettle and fishtank to separate hydrogen and distills it out. #materials #bootstrapping
on 02016-10-10#CodysLab #video with beekeeping, chokecherries, and flame-cutting and #welding steel with an oxyhydrogen torch. And MELTING TUNGSTEN. And a crude version of the Birkeland-Eyde process, assayed with calcium carbonate. #bootstrapping #materials
on 02016-10-10jokey #Video of mining and timber-framing a mine by Cody, the #CodysLab guy from Logan, Utah, who refined diamonds and platinum from the street. Demonstrates assaying efflorescence for nitrate with charcoal and a modern Geiger counter, showing that the radioactivity inside the mine is four times lower than outside, 0.02 μSv/h. #bootstrapping
on 02016-10-10Constantan has a zero temperature coefficient of resistance (or I guess resistivity) because it incorporates Weston’s Alloy No. 2, which has a negative temperature coefficient of resistance. Or something? I don’t quite understand. This is what Thwaites tried to use for #bootstrapping his toaster heating element because Erin Brockovich scared him away from chromium. #materials
on 02016-07-07#PDF overview of #vacuum technology for the amateur, explicitly intended for #bootstrapping.
on 02015-12-27the #history of #vacuum technology, covering the development of pumping and the otherinventions that depended on it, designed for #bootstrapping a vacuum-capable lab.
on 02015-12-27Rui Ueyama wrote a #bootstrapping #C compiler in 5000 lines of code in 40 days. Starts with a run-time stack machine and single-level parser directly emitting code, later separated into a more conventional tokenizer-parser-generator structure. Supporting standard ABIs. After 29 days it was able to partly self-compile, after 37 days it incorrectly thought it could compile itself, and after 40 days it was self-hosting. #compilers
on 02015-12-14A blog post about #bootstrapping a #laser-cutter.
on 02015-11-30overview of the Global Village Construction Set #bootstrapping project.
on 02015-11-26Jeri Ellsworth makes transistors and integrated circuits at home. #DIY #bootstrapping
on 02015-11-26The tile-roof-hut guy built a fireplace with a chimney and a larger kiln for firing larger pots for cooking. #bootstrapping
on 02015-11-26Thomas Thwaites has published a book about his Toaster Project, where he made a toaster from scratch, inspired by the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. #bootstrapping
on 02015-11-26#Craig-Wright claims, in 2013, that he can make a (modern, but poor quality) pencil from scratch. But he hasn’t done it yet. #bootstrapping
on 02015-11-26oh interesting, Vint Cerf is interested in #archival with the archival #virtual-machine approach, and therefore #bootstrapping, under the name #digital-vellum.
on 02015-09-29#JS #semantics in a core JS, by Arjun Guha, Claudiu Saftoiu (??), and Shriram Krishnamurthi. Their core “λJS” is block-scoped and has side effects (computed property assignment expressions), with a Felleisen-Hieb small-step semantics, but not variable mutation or statement sequencing. It elides constant-property access e.x but not object literals {x:e} in favor of computed lookup. #bootstrapping #pdf
Andy George of “how to make everything” decided to make a sandwich starting by drying out sea salt and planting wheat. It took him six months. #bootstrapping
on 02015-09-29discussion of the #DIY ceramic-roofed hut. #bootstrapping
on 02015-09-10Wow. He made a mudbrick kiln to fire his own ceramic roof tiles, which he hung on a mortise-and-tenon-jointed timber frame that he carved with stone tools he made himself. That’s hardcore. #DIY #bootstrapping
on 02015-09-10