#Hyperspace-Pirate #video on a #jugaad #cooling vest. #toread
on 02026-04-14#Hyperspace-Pirate #video on #manufacturing a #jugaad #cooling setup with phase-change thermal #energy-storage in a bucket of ice with copper-tube heat exchange loops in it, one for a water and ethylene glycol coolant and one for an R600 vapor compression refrigeration loop. #solar #energy #solar-energy
on 02026-04-14#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#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#Hyperspace-Pirate #video about wireless power transmission #electronics using tuned coils, blocking oscillators, ZVS drivers, gate drive transformers for MOSFETs, etc.
on 02025-03-18#video by #Hyperspace-Pirate of zesty bridgewires with 4kJ in a bank of five capacitors in series, with a calculated peak of 10kA, charged up with ZVS #electronics. He blew up his flyback diode and his SCR. Relatively poor slow motion footage. #hardware
on 02025-01-23#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 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 02024-09-24another #video on #manufacturing #ethylene #materials automatically by #Hyperspace-Pirate. He wants to use it as a second-stage refrigerant for his vapor-compression cryocooler for #cryogenics. He wants to separate ethanol into ethylene and water over a propane-heated sapphire catalyst (Wisesorb activated alumina from wisesorbent.com in 3.5mm balls) at 450°, which is fucking awesome. Around 300° to 350° you would instead get ether, and above 550° you mostly get carbon and hydrogen, the production of which starts at around 500°. Between 400° and 500° you mostly get ethylene (and water). Aluminum pipe contains the catalyst (and a thermocouple for temperature control), and copper line and flare nuts move the ethanol and ethylene vapor around. The pieces are supported on cinder blocks and bricks on what looks like a concrete floor. Bubbling the output through water produces a lot of flammable gas, which is probably ethylene. He adds a plastic juice bottle full of water as a bubbler to remove particles and a second plastic juice bottle full of silica-gel desiccant to separate the ethylene from the water, and then a dust filter to remove particles of the silica gel. He bolts together some aluminum L-profiles to hold things in place and 3-D prints a fixture for the bottles. A “25-foot” condenser coil of copper line with a fan blowing on it serves as a heat exchanger to cool the hot ethylene to near ambient. A second bubbler collects the liquids, which include a significant amount of ether. He collects the ethylene output in a beach ball. He uses a fridge compressor to pump it from the beach ball into a pressure tank previously purged with propane. His 500cc of 151-proof Everclear turned into 69.7g of ethylene, only a 39% yield, probably because he made about 50 grams of ether. On a second run he used a higher catalyst temperature and got a 70% yield. Chemical engineer in the comments: “It absolutely blew my mind to see someone casually building a packed-bed plug-flow reactor from plumbing parts and unspecified alumina beads in his garage, and the damn thing actually working! Seriously, well done! (Deep down I’m almost insulted by the fact you managed to get a decent yield without doing any equations to work out the reaction rate, and therefore flow rate and reactor length required 😂)” but he also suggests that the output ethylene product is probably contaminated with a lot of ether.
on 02024-09-03#video #toread on #manufacturing #ethylene #materials automatically by #Hyperspace-Pirate
on 02024-09-03#manufacturing ethane (R170) #materials for refrigerant (for the second stage of a cascade). His R600a tabletop icemaker compressor was able to condense CO₂ and N₂O despite only reaching 10 bar, but only barely handled ethylene, which he had made by running ethanol through Al₂O₃ at 450°. So he’s making ethane by Kolbe #electrolysis of sodium acetate on a platinum anode, liberating CO₂, which he has to remove with a Ca(OH)₂ scrubber. To avoid producing lye and thus oxygen, he includes an excess of acetate, in the form of vinegar; he got a weird oil making the sodium acetate. He uses ABS putty dissolved in acetone to seal his electrolysis electrode junctions inside an ABS sleeve he 3-D printed. He switched to using a float switch because his conductivity probe made of two stainless-steel screws was failing, maybe because of the oil. Includes Faraday calculations from first principles. Demonstrates burning soap bubbles of C₂H₆/CO₂ squeezed out of a syringe. He didn’t use enough vinegar, so his pH rose to 9.6, meaning that this process is an effective way to make alkali (probably Na₂CO₃, as evidenced by CO₂ bubbles when he adds more vinegar), since the anion turns into gas. With the pH at 5.6 he got 1.08ℓ/hour of gas from 700mA, close to the theoretical 0.94. His scrubber and gas drier are two packed-bed jam jars with pipes and hoses glued onto their lids and bases, sitting on 3-D-printed supports. By spraying liquid ethane all over the place after precooling it to -12° with his first refrigeration stage, he gets to -90°. He thinks a PbO₂ anode would work too. #video #Hyperspace-Pirate
on 02024-04-03