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The lead-acid rechargeable battery is a not-quite-modern marvel. Super reliable and easy to use, charging it is just a matter of applying a fixed voltage to it and waiting a while; eventually the battery is charged and stays topped off, and that’s it. Their ease is countered by their size, weight, energy density, and toxic materials.

The lithium battery is the new hotness, but their high energy density means a pretty small package that can get very angry and dangerous when mishandled. Academics have been searching for safer batteries, better charge management systems, and longer lasting battery formulations that can be recharged thousands of times, and a recent publication is generating a lot of excitement about it.

Consider the requirements for a battery cell in an electric car:

• High energy density (Lots of power stored in a small size)
• Quick charge ability
• High discharge ability
• MANY recharge cycles
• Low self-discharge
• Safe

Lithium polymer batteries are the best option we have right now, but there are a variety of lipo chemistries, and depending on the expected use and balancing and charging, different chemistries can be optimized for different performance characteristics. There’s no perfect battery yet, and conflicting requirements mean that the battery market will likely always have some options.

How a LiPo Works How a Li-ion battery discharges. Image by Sdk16420 CC-BY-SA

All batteries work the same way. There are 3 components: an anode, a cathode, and an electrolyte. A chemical reaction between the electrolyte and the electrodes (the anode and cathode) creates ions near one part of an electrode and electrons on the other, giving the two terminals a difference in potential. The two electrodes are made of different materials. The anode is graphite bound to copper, and the cathode is some lithium crystal bound to aluminum. The electrolyte is a sort of insulator, so the electrons are better off going through the circuit from one electrode to the other than to make an internal short. Once the reaction is complete, the battery is dead, and the reaction won’t happen unless there’s a path for the electrons to move (aka a closed circuit). To charge a battery, the process is reversed, and power applied to the electrolyte undoes the chemical reaction. Not all electrolytes are created the same, however, and the chemistry of a non-rechargeable battery means that it can store more energy, but applying power in reverse doesn’t undo the chemical reaction.

It’s best to maximize the battery by taking advantage of surface area, so the anode/electrolyte/cathode sandwich benefits from being as thin as possible with lots of area touching. Also, the sandwich has a few more slices of materials with porous layers between them to allow ion transfer without allowing material migration. Now take your battery sandwich and put a bunch of them together in a stack with separators, and you have either a pouch battery (cheap cell in a silver casing), a prismatic battery (fancy cell that you’d find on a laptop), or roll it into a small tube and you have a cylindrical battery (like the 18650 or AA).

The Million Mile Battery

You may have seen the news recently about Tesla’s Million Mile battery. It was actually a group of researchers from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada under contract with Tesla, but they did a LOT of testing of a variety of LiPo batteries to find the best chemistries and use profiles and charging profiles. The million mile battery is just a good PR term to describe the research that optimized some battery formulations and resulted in much longer lifetimes. The full paper is filled with technical jargon, so I spent the weekend learning all about batteries in order to distill it here. You’re welcome.

The first thing to note about their million mile formula is that it doesn’t represent most current drivers that identify as average commuters. Rather, they’re targeting the use cases that will use the vehicle almost constantly and charge when the battery is empty. This would be for long-haul semi trucks, taxis, and buses. Their term was 100% DOD, or Depth of Discharge, where they run the battery all the way to empty before charging it back up again, unlike a cell phone which is usually plugged in every night no matter the state of charge.

Findings: Batteries Like it Cool; Hot New Chemical Formulations

They found that temperature matters a lot. A battery that spent most of its life at 20ºC resulted in a longer lasting battery than at 40ºC, but a battery that spent time at a high temperature and then went to a lower temperature then lost its capacity at the same rate as other low-temperature samples. In other words, a cell at higher temperatures loses capacity faster, and a cell at lower temperature still loses capacity over time but not as fast, and a single battery can move anywhere on that line without memory. The lower temperature meant less degradation at a molecular level, with fewer cracks, dendrites, gas pockets, etc. They couldn’t stress enough how important it was to keep everything cool.

The research team spent a lot of time in previous studies looking at other chemistries, but had primarily settled on NMC532/graphite as their electrodes (as has most of the research community). In chemistry terms, NMC532 is another name for LiNi0.5%Mn0.3%Co0.2%O2, and in lay-speak it means the cathode is mostly lithium crystals, with a sprinkling of nickel, manganese, cobalt, and oxygen, and the anode is graphite (though research into graphene is promising).

Calling the battery NMC532/graphite isn’t quite sufficient, though. You still need to specify an electrolyte. The electrolyte is a slurry of LiPF6 and solvents and additives with fun names to say out loud, like dimethyl carbonate and ethylene sulfate. In this study they tried out a few combinations of solvents. The additives can also change the performance of the cell, giving it a higher charge/discharge rating at the expense of overall lifetime, or vice versa. Based on previous studies, they were really excited about 2 different additive formulas (2%FEC+1%LFO, and 2%VC+1%DTD), though they discovered that the two had different performances at different temperatures, so they suggested that the choice of additives could be application-specific. In the production of cells, usually the dry packs are manufactured, and then the wet electrolyte slurry is injected. See Sparkfun’s tutorial tour through a manufacturing plant for a visual story of the process.

With this special formula, and maintaining a low temperature, they were able to minimize the two main things that cause degradation of a battery; lithium inventory loss, and increased impedance. Generally, over time the lithium ions move around and eventually get themselves into locations that aren’t helpful for the battery. They can get electrically isolated, they can group together into plates and dendrites and surface films, and they can react with other components of the cell and become unavailable for charging/discharging. The dendrites are particularly bad because these sharp little lithium needles can pierce the separators, causing a short circuit in the cell, which then heats up and causes a runaway reaction that ultimately explodes. Impedance is increased through electrode corrosion or just in general less surface area being available, either through reactions or cracking or resistive surface layers forming and blocking the electrode.

There are lots of ways a LiPo cell can degrade, but most of them are summarized as “atoms move where they shouldn’t.” Image via Science Direct

One of the reasons this study got so much attention is that is was thorough and entirely open. It took them 3 years, running thousands of cycles on each battery, with extremely accurate chargers and dischargers to record the capacity, to get the most complete data they could. Usually accelerated lifetime testing on batteries is difficult, as it’s still putting the battery at higher charge/discharge rates than expected in real life, with less recovery time, so the fact that they put so much time into this testing means the results are more realistic. They also specifically said:

Full details of these cells including electrode compositions, electrode loadings, electrolyte compositions, additives used, etc. have been provided in contrast to literature reports using commercial cells. This has been done so that others can re-create these cells and use them as benchmarks for their own R+D efforts be they in the spaces of Li-ion cells or “beyond Li-ion cells”.

It’s refreshing to see commercially funded research made publicly available, and Creative Commons no less.

Despite its openness, we probably won’t be seeing homebrew LiPo batteries soon (but we’d love to cover it if any of you try). From the battery application community we may be seeing battery chemistry change towards the formulation suggested, and we’ll likely see a lot more attention paid to cooling, as that significantly improves their life. And we’re pretty certain that if you want a battery pack, Tesla will soon be happy to sell you one of theirs from their gigafactories.

Tags:  chemistry hacks  

Researchers from l’Université Grenoble Alpes and the University of San Diego recently developed and patented a flexible device that’s able to produce electrical energy from human sweat. The lactate/O2 biofuel cell has been demonstrated to light an LED, leading to further development in the area of harvesting energy through wearables.

[via Advanced Functional Materials]The research was published in Advanced Functional Materials on September 25, 2019. The potential use cases for this type of biofuel cell within the wearables space include medical and athletic monitoring. By using biofuels present in human fluids, the devices can rely on an efficient energy source that easily integrated with the human body.

Scientists have developed a flexible conductive material made up of carbon nanotubes, cross-linked polymers, and enzymes connected to each and printed through screen-printing. This type of composite is known as a buckypaper, and uses the carbon nanotubes as the electrode material.

The lactate oxidase works as the anode and the bilirubin oxidase (from the yellowish compound found in blood) as the cathode. Given the theoretical high power density of lactate, this technology has the potential to produce even more power than its current power generation of 450 µW.

[via Advanced Functional Materials]The cell follows deformations in the skin and produces electrical energy through oxygen reduction and oxidation of the lactate in perspiration. A boost converter is used to increase the voltage to continuously power an LED. The biofuel cells currently delivered 0.74V of open circuit voltage. As measurements for power generation had to be taken with the biofuel cell against human skin, the device has shown to be productive even when stretched and compressed.

At the moment, the biggest cost for production is the price of the enzymes that transform the compounds in sweat. Beyond cost considerations, the researchers also need to look at ways to increase the voltage in order to power larger portable devices.

With all the exciting research surrounding wearable technology right now, hopefully we’ll be hearing about further developments and applications from this research group soon!

[Thanks to Qes for the tip!]

Tags:  chemistry hacks  

What do fitness trackers have to do with bacterial cultures in the lab? Absolutely nothing, unless and until someone turns a fitness band into a general-purpose optical densitometer for the lab.

This is one of those stories that shows that you never know from where inspiration is going to come. [Chinna Devarapu] learned that as a result of playing around with cheap fitness bands, specifically an ID107HR. A community has built up around hacking these bands; we featured a similar band that was turned into an EEG. With some help, [Chinna] was able to reflash the microcontroller and program it in the Arduino IDE, and began looking for a mission for the sensor-laden platform.

He settled on building a continuous optical densitometer for his biology colleagues. Bacterial cultures become increasingly turbid as the grow, and measuring the optical density (OD) of a culture is a common way to monitor its growth phase. This is usually done by sucking up a bit of the culture to measure, but [Chinna] and his team were able to use the hacked fitness band’s heartrate sensor to measure the OD on the fly. The tracker fits in a 3D-printed holder where an LED can shine through the growing culture; the sensor’s photodiode measures the amount of light getting through and the raw data is available via the tracker’s Bluetooth. The whole thing can be built for less than $20, and the plans have been completely open-sourced.

We really like the idea of turning these fitness bands into something completely different. With the capabilities these things pack into such a cheap and compact package, they should start turning up in more and more projects.

Tags:  chemistry hacks  

There are a lot of ways that metals can be formed into various shapes. Forging, casting, and cutting are some methods of getting the metal in the correct shape. An oft-overlooked aspect of smithing (at least by non-smiths) is the effect of temperature on the final characteristics of the metal, such as strength, brittleness, and even color. A smith may dunk a freshly forged sword into a bucket of oil or water to make the metal harder, or a craftsman with a drill bit might treat it with an extremely cold temperature to keep it from wearing out as quickly.

Welcome to the world of cryogenic treatment. Unlike quenching, where a hot metal is quickly cooled to create a hard crystal structure in the metal, cryogenic treatment is done by cooling the metal off slowly, and then raising it back up to room temperature slowly as well. The two processes are related in that they both achieve a certain amount of crystal structure formation, but the extreme cold helps create even more of the structure than simply tempering and quenching it does. The crystal structure wears out much less quickly than untreated steel, therefore the bits last much longer.

[Applied Science] goes deep into the theory behind these temperature treatments on the steel, and the results speak for themselves. With the liquid nitrogen treatments the bits were easily able to drill double the number of holes on average. The experiment was single-blind too, so the subjectivity of the experimenter was limited. There’s plenty to learn about heat-treated metals as well, even if you don’t have a liquid nitrogen generator at home.

Thanks to [baldpower] for the tip!

Tags:  chemistry hacks  

We love unique ways of displaying data here at Hackaday, and this ingenious thermochromic display created by [Moritz v. Sivers] more than fits the bill. Using sheets of color changing liquid crystals and careful temperature control of the plates they’re mounted on, he’s built a giant seven-segment display that can colorfully (albeit somewhat slowly) show the current temperature and humidity.

The sheets of temperature sensitive liquid crystals are a bit like flattened out Mood Rings; they starts out black, but as heat is applied, their color cycles through vibrant reds, greens, and blues. The sheets are perhaps best known as the sort of vaguely scientific toys you might see in a museum gift shop, but here [Moritz] has put their unique properties to practical use.

To achieve the effect, he first cut each segment out of copper. The crystal sheets were applied to the segments, thanks to their handy self-stick backing, and the excess was carefully trimmed away. Each segment was then mounted to a TES1-12704 Peltier module by way of thermally conductive epoxy. TB6612FNG motor controllers and a bevy of Arduino Nano’s are used to control the Peltier modules, raising and lowering their temperature as necessary to get the desired effect.

You can see the final result in the video after the break. It’s easily one of the most attractive variations on the classic seven-segment display we’ve ever seen. In fact, we’d go as far as to say it could pass for an art installation. The idea of a device that shows the current temperature by heating itself up certainly has a thoughtful aspect to it.

This actually isn’t the first display we’ve seen that utilized this concept, though it’s by far the largest. Back in 2014 we featured a small flexible display that used nichrome wires to “print” digits on a sheet of liquid crystals.

Tags:  chemistry hacks  

We’re always on the lookout for unexpected budget builds here at Hackaday, and stumbling across a low-cost, DIY version of an instrument that sells for tens of thousands of dollars is always a treat. And so when we saw a tip for a homebrew gas chromatograph in the tips line this morning, we jumped on it. (Video embedded below.)

For those who haven’t had the pleasure, gas chromatography is a chemical analytical method that’s capable of breaking a volatile sample up into its component parts. Like all chromatographic methods, it uses an immobile matrix to differentially retard the flow of a mobile phase containing the sample under study, such that measurement of the transit time through the system can be made and information about the physical properties of the sample inferred.

The gas chromatograph that [Chromatogiraffery] built uses a long stainless steel tube filled with finely ground bentonite clay, commonly known as kitty litter, as the immobile phase. A volatile sample is injected along with an inert carrier gas – helium from a party balloon tank, in this case – and transported along the kitty litter column by gas pressure. The sample interacts with the column as it moves along, with larger species held back while smaller ones speed along. Detection is performed with thermal conductivity cells that use old incandescent pilot lamps that have been cracked open to expose their filaments to the stream of gas; using a Wheatstone bridge and a differential amp, thermal differences between the pure carrier gas and the eluate from the column are read and plotted by an Arduino.

The homebrew GC works surprisingly well, and we can’t wait for [Chromatogiraffery] to put out more details of his build.

Thanks to [Heye] for the tip.

Tags:  chemistry hacks  

Rechargeable batteries are a technology that has been with us for well over a century, and which is undergoing a huge quantity of research into improved energy density for both mobile and alternative energy projects. But the commonly used chemistries all come with their own hazards, be they chemical contamination, fire risk, or even cost due to finite resources. A HardwareX paper from a team at the University of Idaho attempts to address some of those concerns, with an open-source rechargeable battery featuring electrode chemistry involving iron on both of its sides. This has the promise of a much cheaper construction without the poisonous heavy metal of a lead-acid cell or the expense and fire hazard of a lithium one.

A diagram of the all-iron cell.

The chemistry of this cell is split into two by an ion-exchange membrane, iron (II) chloride is the electrolyte on the anode side where iron is oxidised to iron 2+ ions, and Iron (III) chloride on the cathode where iron is reduced to iron hydroxide. The result is a cell with a low potential of only abut 0.6V, but at a claimed material cost of only $0.10 per kWh Wh of stored energy. The cells will never compete on storage capacity or weight, but this cost makes them attractive for fixed installations.

It’s encouraging to see open-source projects coming through from HardwareX, we noted its launch back in 2016.

Thanks [Julien] for the tip.

Tags:  chemistry hacks  

One of my favorite ways to think of engineering is that a glass is not half empty or half full, only twice as large as it needs to be. As useful as that idea is, it also means that I rarely put any effort into the aesthetics of my projects – I learn or accomplish what I need, desolder and recycle the components, then move on. Few of my projects are permanent, and custom cases tend to be non-reusable, so I skip the effort and expense.

Once in a while though, I need to make a gift. In that case form and function both become priorities. Thankfully, all that glitters is not gold – and over the last year I’ve been learning to etch the copper alloys commonly classified as ‘brass’. We’ve covered some truly excellent etched brass pieces previously, and I was inspired to try and etch larger pieces of metal (A4 and larger) without sacrificing resolution. I thought this would be just like etching circuits. In fact, I went through several months of failed attempts before I produced anything halfway decent!

Although I’m still working on perfecting my techniques, I’ve learned enough in the meantime to give a report. Read on if you’re feeling the need for more fancy brass signs in your life.

In Asia, brass is a very common decorative material, and I can easily buy it as needed at USD $9 per kilogram in a variety of forms. I started by purchasing about 10 kg of brass sheets, rods, and foils to work out what was practical.

The first lesson learned was that cheap brass flashing, a sort of 0.2 mm thick foil that comes in a roll, just fell apart during etching. The zinc reacted out much faster than the copper, leaving a brittle and ugly mess of copper. This problem disappeared when I used thicker brass, typically 1 mm to 2 mm thick from China or Taiwan, both proved to be good quality.

Not So Hot

The second lesson learned was that even relatively thin brass foil (around 0.2 mm) sinks heat much more than a PCB of equivalent size. I usually etch circuits using the toner transfer method, approximately as detailed here. I found that a clothes iron could not typically heat the brass enough to fuse the toner properly. I attempted two methods to get around this: switching to heat-free processes and using higher-powered heating.

I tried three types of heat-free processes. In the first, I simply bought UV photoresist sheets and tried to adhere them to the brass. I quickly found that my photoresist sheets were terrible, and it was practically impossible to avoid bubbles forming between the photoresist and the brass pretty much everywhere, even when applying the photoresist underwater.

As a test run, I tried to make a sign for our front door. This was (sadly) the best of many tries with photoresist film.

I reasoned that painting on photoresist wouldn’t have that problem, but could not find any local source of photoresist paint. As a result I bought some UV-cure acrylic (the kind used by nail salons). Unfortunately, the curing process did not result in a usable resist: the areas shielded from UV still hardened just enough that I couldn’t clean the brass sheet properly with solvent afterwards. Nonetheless, I suspect a better method of applying photoresist, such as paint or spray, would produce superior results.

I did find that UV-cure acrylic works very well as an etch resist when cured, although it requires some patience and a nasty solvent to remove. One advantage it has is a long working time in a environment with very low UV light. I ended up using it for touch ups when I had an acceptably working process.

As a final attempt to avoid high temperature processes, I tried applying a mixture of about 15% xylene and 85% methanol (xylene and water are not miscible) to the printed paper to render the toner sticky enough to adhere to the brass, press it on, and let it dry before soaking in water and removing. The toner did become sticky and adhere a little, but I found that it did not adhere to the brass as well as it did with applied heat. Applying both organic solvents and heat was not something I had the equipment to try safely, so I gave up on that avenue as well.

Into the Fire

Having given up on low-temperature processes, I focused on heating the brass sheet to a high enough temperature to reliably transfer toner without burning myself terribly. An iron or document laminator were not powerful enough except for very small pieces of brass, and I was interested in etching large panels to paint and use as signage, kitchenware, panel art, or components of furniture.

I knew from previous experience that a heat press for t-shirts would work fairly well — I had tried on steel and large PCB panels — only requiring some touch-up on the edges of the piece. However, a heat press isn’t something I have space for at home right now, and they aren’t that cheap either. Thankfully, with a little bit of preparation and practice, my gas stove worked just fine.

The key turned out to be placing a large 2 mm thick brass sheet across my stove element, and placing the smaller piece on top of it so that pressure could be applied to any point on the piece without risking flipping any hot pieces of metal off the stove and onto myself. It’s worth practicing this a a few times without any heat applied to be sure your setup is as stable and as safe as you think it is!

I heated the brass to a temperature where it would melt toner, but not burn paper, then turned the stove off. With the more massive bottom sheet acting like a heat sink, I placed the paper toner side down on the piece, placed a cotton cloth over it, and used a rolling pin to apply even pressure. I then heated it up again turned off the stove, and repeated the process for a good even bond.

I could have probably used my electric oven to heat the brass instead, but the gas stove proved fast and effective.

Regardless, you’ve got a fair mass of hot metal here – analogous to taking cookies out of the oven on an abnormally heavy baking sheet. It’s not searing hot, but is hot enough and has sufficient thermal mass that it can burn you painfully. You’ll likely want to wear appropriate clothing and shoes. My preference is to also keep a container full of water, oven gloves, and a fire extinguisher at hand.

Touch Up

The result of the above was that I could transfer toner onto much larger and thicker pieces of metal. Probably anything larger than A3 size would require refining the method. Regardless, there were some minor imperfections in the toner coverage. For a circuit this would be OK, but here it affects the looks significantly.

To fix these errors, first I cleaned most of the paper off the piece so that all areas meant to be etched were fully exposed. Then I used UV-cure acrylic nail polish to correct any areas where the toner visibly didn’t bond. I worked in a room lit with non-UV sources so I wouldn’t have to worry about working time. Once the corrections were done to my satisfaction, I left the brass piece out in the sun for two minutes to cure. Next I rubbed black water-based acrylic paint into the piece and then quickly wiped clean and let dry. The idea here was that there were enough paper fibers still adhered to the toner that the acrylic paint would soak in a little, and provide additional protection to the areas covered with toner. Meanwhile, it wiped clean off the exposed brass areas. This noticeably decreased pockmarks caused by small amounts of etchant slipping past the toner.

Left: Sign after removal from stove with water applied. Center: Detergent applied and paper rubbed off. Right: Acrylic paint applied to reinforce etch resist. Note the error on the ‘a’, corrected with UV cure acrylic.

Finally, I taped down the edges, as well as any large uniform areas of toner, to maximize the protection against the etchant. I could see the tape and acrylic both helped keep the etchant contained within useful areas. I carefully sponged on ferric chloride for around 20 minutes. Hydrochloric acid requires police documentation to purchase in my area and earlier experiments using electro-etching produced unsatisfactory results.

After etching, I removed the toner using xylene while outdoors and with a large fan to my back. Safety aside, I have strong opinions about which organic solvents smell the worst and xylene is near the top of the list.

Back In Black

I tried two methods for painting: the first was to use linseed-oil-based lamp black – literally the type of black paint used in fancy oil paintings. This produced the nicest result at first, but took excruciatingly long to do, proved impractical when it came to fine details, and had poor mechanical resistance to abrasive brass polish. It also takes at least a week to dry.

The alternative method is to paint the sign approximately correctly with water based acrylic paint, let it partially dry, then lightly sand the sign down with very fine grit sandpaper. The paint will have a tendency to remain in the grooves that you’ve etched. You keep painting, sanding, and repainting until the pattern you’ve etched is fully painted. Then you repolish the sign and hope it all stays in place.

Sadly, I could not find a store that carried enamel oil paints (the type for painting plastic models came to mind). That would have probably worked far better. I also considered using a black wax crayon or sealing wax, then heating the sign and letting it flow into the etched grooves.

As a final step, you may consider protecting your work with a varnish, although this is not strictly necessary. I’ve found the paint stays well enough to tolerate light polishing with brass cleaner. Now you can frivolously make everything out of brass, just like in Dwarf Fortress.

I think a fair conclusion would be that of all the methods I applied, toner transfer produced the best results, but significant improvements should be possible with UV-cure etch resist. The biggest issue with toner transfer was the etch resist did not completely prevent etchant from reacting with the brass, especially near the edges of the piece. I think this could be resolved with spray or paint on UV-cure etch resist, or perhaps even film of less suspect quality.

Incidentally, the gift I later made with this process was for a friend’s wedding, and it turned out quite well the day before the ceremony. A fortunate result to a few months of tinkering, but progress continues.

Tags:  chemistry hacks  

If you’ve been around long enough, you’ll know there’s a long history of advances in materials science that get blown far out of proportion by both the technical and the popular media. Most of the recent ones seem to center on the chemistry of carbon, particularly graphene and nanotubes. Head back a little in time and superconductors were all the rage, and before that it was advanced ceramics, semiconductors, and synthetic diamonds. There’s always some new miracle material to be breathlessly and endlessly reported on by the media, with hopeful tales of how one or the other will be our salvation from <insert catastrophe du jour here>.

While there’s no denying that each of these materials has led to huge advancements in science, industry, and the quality of life for billions, the development cycle from lab to commercialization is generally a tad slower than the press would have one believe. And so when a new material starts to gain traction in the headlines, as perovskites have recently, we feel like it’s a good opportunity to take a close look, to try to smooth out the ups and downs of the hype curve and manage expectations.

Mind the Band Gap

To the extent that you’ve heard about perovskites – and you probably have, with coverage right here on these pages and a full Amp Hour podcast devoted to them – you’ve probably got the impression that they’re some newly discovered material that can be used to build solar cells that are better than the current crop of silicon photovoltaics. There’s a lot more to perovskites than PV, though, and the chemistry behind them is pretty interesting too.

Perovskite, the mineral. By Rob Lavinsky, iRocks.com – CC-BY-SA-3.0

To start with, perovskite – note the singular – is a mineral, calcium titanate (CaTiO₃), first discovered in the Ural mountains in the late 19th-century and named after famed Russian mineralogist Lev Perovski. Naturally occurring perovskite deposits are found all over the world, and the mineral is mined commercially.

Perovskites, on the other hand, are natural and synthetic compounds that match the crystal structure of natural perovskite. The general form of perovskites is ABC₃, where C is usually oxygen and A and B are positively charged ions, or cations. A is generally an alkaline or rare-earth metal, while B is usually one of the metals from the transition series on the periodic table. Some synthetic perovskites even substitute organic cations for the inorganic metal, resulting in hybrid perovskites with interesting and useful properties ranging from superconductivity to optoelectronics.

The reason that perovskites have so much promise as photovoltaics is that they are much better at absorbing light than silicon, thanks to the fact that perovskites have a direct band gap, rather than silicon’s indirect band gap. The band gap of a material refers to the energy needed to move electrons around in it, and indirect band gap materials have to shuttle electrons around in a two-step process. The practical effect of this means that indirect band gap materials need to be thicker to absorb enough light to work. A silicon layer 200 microns thick is needed to absorb the same amount of energy as a half-micron layer of a hybrid perovskite such as a methylammonium lead trihalide (CH₃NH₃PbX₃, where X is usually iodine or bromine). What’s more, the band gap of hybrid perovskites can be tweaked to cover more of the spectrum by fiddling with the ratio of halides, as shown in the featured image above.

Schematic for a perovskite-fullerene PV cell. The methylammonium lead iodide acts as an electron donor, while the C60 fullerene layer acts as the acceptor. Source: Jeng et al, Methylammonium lead iodide perovskite/
fullerene-based hybrid solar cells

Another selling point of hybrid perovskites is that can be made into aqueous solutions, which can then be applied to a substrate such as glass using very simple techniques like vapor deposition or spin-coating. There’s even work going on with printing perovskites using modified ink-jet printers. Contrast these processes with the laborious methods of silicon solar cell production, which basically require most of the trappings of a semiconductor fab, and you can see that the excitement about perovskite solar cells (PSCs) is justified.

Perovskites are not the be-all and end-all of solar cell technology, of course. There are significant problems, including lower efficiency than silicon cells. That’s likely a temporary problem, though; whereas silicon PVs have taken almost 70 years to get from 6% efficiency to the current 27% efficiency of commercial cells, PSCs are already at 23%, and they’ve only been in development since 2009. With more work, perovskite efficiency could eclipse silicon PVs and approach the theoretical maximum of 31%.

The real drawback for PSCs is engineering them to stand up to weathering; the water-solubility that makes hybrid perovskites so easy to work with also makes it tough to moisture-proof PSCs. UV degradation of the dyes is a problem, too – organic compounds are famously labile under UV radiation, and layers that can filter out the UV reliably without blocking other wavelengths need to be applied over the perovskite layer.

Sensors for X-Ray

The potential boost in efficiency and decrease in costs make it a good bet that the engineering problems surrounding PSCs will be addressed and full commercialization will begin. But turning sunlight into energy is far from the only trick that perovskites can perform, and might not even be their most lucrative application. Medical imaging, particularly with X-rays, is poised to benefit greatly from perovskite-based sensors.

Being just another wavelength of light, X-rays interact with perovskites similarly, converting them to electric charges that can be sensed directly. This differs from the majority of current X-ray sensors used for digital radiography, which are indirect sensors – a plate covered with a compound that emits light when struck by X-rays, known as a scintillator, is sandwiched to a standard charge-coupled device (CCD), which picks up the light and creates a digital representation of the differential penetration of tissues by the X-rays. This has the benefit of being very sensitive and reducing the dose of X-ray necessary to produce an image, but at the cost of reduced resolution since light from the scintillator grains spreads out before striking the CCD detector.

A direct sensor, on the other hand, converts the incident X-rays directly to electric charges, greatly increasing the resolution that can be achieved. But conventional semiconductor direct X-ray sensors, which typically use selenium, suffer from the same problem that silicon does when used as a solar cell – it doesn’t absorb electromagnetic radiation very well. That makes selenium detectors slow to acquire an image, requiring a higher X-ray dose. Perovskite direct sensors, though, absorb much better and result in far better resolution sensors that require much lower doses.

Schematic of perovskite x-ray sensor (a) and the actual panel (b). The x-ray image (e) of the PCB was made with the sensor. Source: Chen et al, All-inorganic perovskite nanocrystal scintillators.

Many of the same hurdles facing the commercialization of perovskite in solar cells remain for X-ray sensors. But the multi-billion dollar medical imaging industry may well have the upper hand in getting perovskites to market first. It’s far easier to protect a perovskite X-ray sensor from the moisture and rough handling associated with patient care than it is to engineer PSCs to withstand the years of sleeting ultraviolet rays and wind-driven rain that any practical solar array has to deal with.

That said, what’s learned by the medical imaging applications for perovskites will no doubt drive the development of PSCs, and our guess is that perovskites will be a household word within the next five years or so.

[Featured image source: National University of Singapore]

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Leather hardening has been around for such a long time that one might think that there was little left to discover, but [Jason F. Timmermans] certainly showed that is not the case. Right around the end of 2018 he set up experiments to compare different techniques for hardening leather, and empirically determine the best options. After considerable effort, he crafted a new method with outstanding results. It’s part of his exhaustive testing of different techniques for hardening leather, including some novel ones. It was a considerable amount of work but [Jason] says that he gathered plenty of really useful information, which we’re delighted that he took the time to share it.

According to [Jason], the various methods of hardening can be separated into four groups:

1. Thermal: heat-treating at 180 ºF or higher, usually via some kind of boiling or baking process.
2. Chemical: soaking in a substance that causes changes in the leather. Some examples include ammonia, vinegar, acetone, brine, and alcohol.
3. Mechanical: hammering the leather.
4. “Stabilizing” methods: saturating the leather with a substance to add rigidity and strength without otherwise denaturing the leather itself. Examples include beeswax, pine pitch, stearic acid, and epoxy.

We recommend making the time to follow the link in the first paragraph and read the full results, but to summarize: heat-treating generally yields a strong but brittle product, and testing revealed stearic acid  — which resembles a kind of hard, dense wax at room temperature — was an early standout for overall great results. Stearic acid has many modern uses and while it was unclear from [Jason]’s reasearch exactly when in history it became commonplace, at least one source mentioned it as a candidate for hardening leather.

But the story doesn’t stop there. Unsatisfied with simply comparing existing methods, [Jason] put a lot of work into seeing if he could improve things. One idea he had was to combine thermal treatment with a stabilizer, and it had outstanding results. The winning combination (named X1 in his writeup) was to preheat the leather then immerse it in melted stearic acid, followed by bringing the temperature of the combination to 200 ºF for about a minute to heat treat the leather at the same time. [Jason]’s observation was that this method “[B]lew the rest out of the water. Cutting the sample to view the cross section was like carving wood. The leather is very rigid and strong.”

The world may not revolve around leather the way it used to, but there’s still stuff to learn and new things to discover. For example, modern tools can allow for novel takes on old techniques, like using 3D printing to create custom leather embossing jigs.

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There can be few of us who haven’t gazed with fascination upon the work of IC decappers, whether they are showing us classic devices from the early years of mass semiconductor manufacture, or reverse-engineering the latest and greatest. But so often their work appears to require some hardcore scientific equipment or particularly dangerous chemicals. We’ve never thought we might be able to join the fun. [Generic Human] is out to change all that, by decapping chips using commonly available chemicals and easy to apply techniques. In particular, we discover through their work that rosin — the same rosin whose smell you will be familiar with from soldering flux — can be used to dissolve IC packaging.

Of course, ICs that dissolved easily in the face of soldering wouldn’t meet commercial success, so an experiment with flux meets little success. Pure rosin, however, appears to be an effective decapping agent. [Generic Human] shows us a motherboard voltage regulator boiled in the stuff. When the rosin is removed with acetone, there among the debris is the silicon die, reminding us just how tiny these things are. We’re sure you’ll all be anxious to try it for yourselves, now, so take a while to look at the video below showing their CCC Congress talk.

The master of chip decapping is of course [Ken Shirriff], whose work we’ve featured many times. Our editor [Mike Szczys] interviewed him last year, and it’s well worth a look.

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Though much of it is hidden from view, welding is a vital part of society. It’s the glue that holds together the framework of the cars we drive, the buildings we occupy, the appliances we use, and the heavy machinery that keeps us moving forward. Every year, the tireless search continues for stronger and lighter materials to streamline our journey into the future of transportation and space exploration.

Some of these futuristic materials have been around for decades, but the technology needed to weld them lagged behind. A group of researchers at UCLA’s Samueli School of Engineering recently found the key to unlocking the weldability of aluminium alloy 7075, which was developed in the 1940s. By adding titanium carbide nanoparticles to the mix, they were able to create a bond that proved to be stronger than the pieces themselves.

A blacksmith at work. Via BBC. The Hot and Dirty History of Welding

In the simplest terms, welding is defined as ‘the joining of metals and plastics without the use of fasteners’. The most common type is known as fusion welding, where the parent metals are melted together with a flame or an electrode. Non-fusion welding includes soldering and brazing. In these methods, a third metal is used as a filler to help join the pieces.

Welding dates back to the Middle Ages, and the first weldors were blacksmiths. These brave, soot-covered men both cut and joined pieces of iron together using nothing but fire, hammers, and a deep well of patience. The Industrial Revolution increased the demand for welding by several orders of magnitude, because much of the machinery from that era was made by casting molten metal. This brought about an entire sub-industry built on a new cast welding process, which involved heating the broken bits, bolting a mold around them, and pouring in molten metal.

When electricity arrived in the 20th century, the carbon-arc rods used in lighting fixtures sparked the idea of arc welding. Arc welding works by creating a circuit between a power supply (the arc welder) and the metals to be welded. The ground lead is clamped to the work piece, and the positive lead runs to a spring-loaded clamp that holds a 12-14″ electrode. This rod consists of a parent-matched filler metal coated with a flux material that turns into a gas when heated. This gas shields the work piece and the filler metal from impurities in the air while the bead is formed. The downside is that it also creates a solidified slag of filth that must be chipped away.

Oxy-acetylene gas welding came soon after arc welding, and WWI advanced both of these methods. As the aircraft industry began to take off, the demand for lightweight, durable metals and the people to weld them together skyrocketed. A newer style of welding known as GTAW (gas tungsten arc welding), Heli-Arc, or TIG (tungsten inert gas) began to gain popularity. Though difficult to master, TIG welding offers finer control and gives excellent results.

AA7075 plate, available from Midwest Steel and Aluminium Not All Alloys are Allies

Many commonly welded metals are alloys of several different metals. This is because pure metals are too soft (and valuable) for the frames of cars and buildings. The only problem is that some alloys’ constituent metals don’t melt together well. When heated, the different metals flow unevenly, and cracks develop along the welded joint. This Achilles heel renders a number of otherwise strong and reputable alloys useless for welded applications.

AA7075 is one of these alloys. This decades-old concoction of aluminium, zinc, magnesium, and copper is extremely strong yet lightweight. It’s ideal for a number of applications, especially where fuel efficiency and battery conservation are valued. The only problem is that AA7075 is highly susceptible to cracking when welded. Though it is widely used in riveted-together airplane fuselages, AA7075 generally considered to be unweldable by any means.

Successful arc weld of AA7075 using titanium carbide-infused filler rod. Via UCLA. Killer Filler

A UCLA research team led by graduate student Maximilian Sokoluk and Professor Xiaochun Li have given the alloy a new lease on life. They’ve found a way to TIG weld two pieces of AA7075 together without any cracking whatsoever.

TIG (tungsten inert gas) welding uses a non-consumable tungsten electrode situated inside a torch. During welding, the torch releases helium or argon, which shields the weld from impurities. A separate filler wire made from a compatible alloy can be fed in to complete the joint, though it’s not required for thicker base metals.

The paper describes how adding titanium carbide nanoparticles to the mix allowed them to create a bond that proved to be stronger than the pieces themselves. The wire’s filler metal is infused with titanium carbide nanoparticles, which strengthen the mechanical properties of the metal in the melt zone. Using electron microscopes, the researchers studied cross-sections of the joints and found that the nanoparticles changed the alloy’s solidification mechanisms. In fact, they provide so much reinforcement that the metal in the melt zone actually becomes harder than the parent metals.

Results of welding with AA7075 filler, ER5356 filler, and nanotreated AA7075 filler rods. Notice the cracking in (b) and (c) but not (d). Via Nature.

The resulting joint is quite strong, with a tensile strength up to 392 megapascals. To put that in slightly more accessible terms, that means it can withstand more than three times the pressure at the bottom of the Mariana, the deepest oceanic trench in the world. Not only is this great news for AA7075, it could create new opportunities for other high-grade, previously unweldable alloys.

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Aluminium is a useful material, both for its light weight and resistance to corrosion. This resistance can be improved further with various treatments, one of the more popular being anodizing. This is the process behind the fancy colored metal bling on your cousin’s BMX bike. It’s possible to perform this …read more

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Some of biology’s most visually striking images come from fluorescence microscopes. Their brilliant colors on black look like a neon sign from an empty highway. A brand new fluorescence microscope is beyond a hacker’s budget and even beyond some labs’, but there are ways to upgrade an entry-level scope for …read more

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Bismuth is a very odd metal that you see in cosmetic pigments and as a replacement for lead, since it is less toxic. You will also see it — or an alloy — in fire sprinklers since it melts readily. However, the most common place you might encounter bismuth is …read more

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Water is a stable chemical, but with the addition of a little electricity, it can be split into its component parts. The result is just the right mix of H2 and O2 to convert back into water with a bang. [Peter Sripol] has built a charming desktop cannon …read more

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It might seem like a paradox, but coal might hold the answer to solving carbon emission problems. The key isn’t burning it, but creating it using carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  While this has always been possible in theory, high temperatures make it difficult in practice. However, a recent paper …read more

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We’ve all seen brightly-colored pieces of aluminum and can identify them as anodized. But what does that mean, exactly? A recent video from [Ariel Yahni] starring [Wawa] — a four-legged assistant — shows how to create pieces like this yourself. You can see [Wawa’s] new dog tag, below.

[Ariel] found …read more

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Aerogels have changed how a lot of high tech equipment is insulated. Resembling frozen smoke, the gel is lightweight and has extremely low thermal conductivity. However there’s always a downside, traditional aerogel material is brittle. Any attempt to compress it beyond 20% of its original size will change the material. …read more

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There’s no debating that metallic sodium is exciting stuff, but getting your hands on some can be problematic, what with the need to ship it in a mineral oil bath to keep it from exploding. So why not make your own? No problem, just pass a few thousand amps of …read more

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We probably don’t need to tell this to the average Hackaday reader, but we’re living in a largely disposable society. Far too many things are built as cheaply as possible, either because manufacturers know you won’t keep it for long, or because they don’t want you to. Of course, the choice if yours if you wish to you accept this lifestyle or not.

Like many of us, [Erik] does not. When the painted markings on his stove become so worn that he couldn’t see them clearly, he wasn’t about to hop off to the appliance store to buy a new …read more

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We know the effect of passing white light through a prism and seeing the color spectrum that comes out of the other side. It will not be noticeable to the naked eye, but that rainbow does not fully span the range of [Roy G. Biv]. There are narrowly absent colors which blur together, and those missing portions are a fingerprint of the matter the white light is passing through or bouncing off. Those with a keen eye will recognize that we are talking about spectrophotometry which is identifying those fingerprints and determining what is being observed and how much is …read more

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Phosphors are key to a whole swathe of display and lighting technologies. Cathode ray tubes, vacuum fluorsecent displays, and even some white LEDs all use phosphors to produce light. [Hydrogen Time] decided to make a green phosphorescent material, and has shared the process on Youtube, embedded below.

The aim is to produce zinc sulfide crystals doped with copper impurities. This creates a phosphor with a familiar green glow. [Hydrogen Time] starts by noting that it’s important to make sure all chemicals used are of good quality, as even slight impurities can spoil the final product.

Zinc sulfide is made into …read more

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There are a whole bunch of high school science experiments out there that are useful for teaching students the basics of biology, physics, and chemistry. One of the classics is the lemon battery. [iqless] decided to have a play with the idea, and whipped up a little something for his students.

The basic lemon battery is remarkably simple. Lemon juice provides the electrolyte, while copper and and zinc act as electrodes. This battery won’t have a hope of charging your Tesla, but you might get enough juice to light an LED or small bulb (pun intended).

[iqless] considered jamming electrodes …read more

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Love it or loathe it, the pharmaceutical industry is really good at protecting its intellectual property. Drug companies pour billions into discovering new drugs and bringing them to market, and they do whatever it takes to make sure they have exclusive positions to profit from their innovations for as long a possible. Patent applications are meticulously crafted to keep the competition at bay for as long as possible, which is why it often takes ages for cheaper generic versions of blockbuster medications to hit the market, to the chagrin of patients, insurers, and policymakers alike.

Drug companies now appear poised …read more

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Ben Krasnow has a vision of future electronics: instead of the present PCB-screwed-into-a-plastic-box construction, flexible circuits will be deposited straight onto the plastic body of the device itself, merging the physical object and its electronics. There is existing copper-on-plastic technology, but Ben’s got something novel that he presents in this talk that you could implement yourself. You might also want a display, or at least something to blink, so he’s also working on some electroluminescent technology to complement it. If you were wondering why Ben is so interested in silkscreening photopolymers right now, watching this talk will pull a lot …read more

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Despite a lot of advances in battery technology, lead acid batteries are still used in many applications due to cost and their ability to provide a lot of surge current. But they don’t last forever. However, [AvE] shows that in some cases a failed battery can be restored with — of all things — epsom salts. If it makes you feel funny to use the stuff grandpa soaks in when he has a backache, you can call it magnesium sulfate.

You can find a complete explanation in the video below (which includes [AvE’s] very colorful language), but fundamentally, the magnesium …read more

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A super-material that’s non-toxic, highly flame resistant, and a good enough insulator, you can literally hold fire in your hand? Our interest was definitely caught by [NightHawkInLight] and his recent video about Starlite, embedded below the break.

Starlite was the brainchild of English hairdresser, [Maurice Ward]. The famous demo was an egg, coated in Starlite, and blasted with a blowtorch for a full 5 minutes. After heating, he cracked the egg to show it still raw. The inventor died in 2011, and apparently the recipe for Starlite died with him.

[NightHawkInLight] realized he had already made something very similar, the …read more

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The world of glues is wide and varied, and it pays to use the right glue for the job. When [Eric] needed to stick a wide and flat 3D printed mount onto the back of a PCB that had been weatherproofed with an uneven epoxy coating, he needed a gap-filling adhesive that would bond to both surfaces. It seemed like a job for the hot glue gun, but the surface was a bit larger than [Eric] was comfortable using with hot glue for. The larger the surface to be glued, the harder it is to do the whole thing before …read more

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Many people hear “fungus” and think of mushrooms. This is akin to hearing “trees” and thinking of apples. Fungus makes up 2% of earth’s total biomass or 10% of the non-plant biomass, and ranges from the deadly to the delicious. This lecture by [Justin Atkin] of [The Thought Emporium] is slightly shorter than a college class period but is like a whole semester’s worth of tidbits, and the lab section is about growing something (potentially) edible rather than a mere demonstration. The video can also be found below the break.

Let’s start with the lab where we learn to grow …read more

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It would be really hard to go through a typical day in the developed world without running across something made from ABS plastic. It’s literally all over the place, from toothbrush handles to refrigerator interiors to car dashboards to computer keyboards. Many houses are plumbed with pipes extruded from ABS, and it lives in rolls next to millions of 3D-printers, loved and hated by those who use and misuse it. And in the form of LEGO bricks, it lurks on carpets in the dark rooms of children around the world, ready to puncture the bare feet of their parents.

ABS …read more

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We hope you have been good this year because we have a list to start your own biology lab and not everything will fit into Santa’s bag (of holding). If you need some last minute goodie points, Santa loves open-source and people who share on our tip line. Our friends at [The Thought Emporium] have compiled a list of the necessary equipment for a biology lab. Chemistry labs-in-a-box have been the inspiration for many young chemists, but there are remarkable differences between a chemistry lab and a biology lab which are explained in the Youtube video linked above and embedded …read more

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We all the know the basic components for building out an electronics lab: breadboards, bench power supply, a selection of components, a multimeter, and maybe an oscilloscope. But what exactly do you need when you’re setting up a biohacking lab?

That’s the question that [Justin] from The Thought Emporium is trying to answer with a series of videos where he does exactly that – build a molecular biology lab from scratch. In the current installment, [Justin] covers the basics of agarose gel electrophoresis, arguably the fundamental skill for aspiring bio-geeks. Electrophoresis is simply using an electric field to separate a …read more

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We’ve talked about transparent wood before. However, the process can be difficult to get just right. [NileRed] recently posted a video with very detailed instructions on how he’s doing it. Aside from the dangerous way he uses a table saw — something he realized after he watched the video — it is some great information.

This isn’t some hand-waving explanation. For nearly 36 minutes, you get an actual demonstration of the steps along with some explanations about why it works and why certain steps are done in a particular way.

Apparently, the chemical treatment — which is similar to how …read more

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Making wine isn’t just about following a recipe, it’s a chemical process that needs to be monitored and managed for best results. The larger the batch, the more painful it is to have something go wrong. This means that the stakes are high for small vineyards such as the family one [Mare] works with, which have insufficient resources to afford high-end equipment yet have the same needs as larger winemakers. The most useful thing to monitor is the temperature profile of the fermentation process, and [Mare] created an exceptional IoT system to do that using LoRa wireless and solar power. …read more

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If you have something rusty, you can get a wire brush and a lot of elbow grease. Or you can let electricity do the work for you in an electrolysis tank. [Miller’s Planet] shows you how to build such a tank, but even better, he explains why it works in a very detailed way.

The tank uses a sodium carbonate electrolyte — just water and washing powder. In the reaction, free electrons from the electrolyte displace the oxygen from the rusted metal piece. A glass container, a steel rod, and a power supply make up the rest.

For an example, …read more

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Right now, you can design a PCB, send it off to a PCB fab, and get professional finished boards in a few days for less than a dollar per square inch. This is fantastic, and it’s the driving force behind ever-dropping costs of hardware development. That’s great and all, but you can make circuit boards at home, easily, and without involving too many toxic chemicals. That’s exactly what [videoschmideo] did, and the results are pretty good.

The process starts with a single-sided copper clad board that would be readily obtainable at Radio Shack if there were any of those around …read more

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Transformer oil has long served two purposes, cooling and insulating. The large, steel encased transformers we see connected to the electrical grid are filled with transformer oil which is circulated through radiator fins for dumping heat to the surrounding air. In the hacker world, we use transformer oil for cooling RF dummy loads and insulating high voltage components. [GreatScott] decided to do some tests of his own to see just how good it is for cooling circuits.

He started with testing canola oil but found that it breaks down from contact with air and becomes rancid. So he purchased some …read more

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Of all the fictional cyborgs who turn against humanity to conquer the planet, this is as far from that possibility as you can get. These harmless mushrooms seem more interested in showing off their excellent fashion sense with a daring juxtaposition of hard grid lines with playful spirals. But the purpose of this bacteria-fungus-technology hybrid is to generate electricity. The mushrooms are there to play nurse to a layer of cyanobacteria, the green gel in the photo, while the straight black lines harvest electricity.

Cyanobacteria do not live very long under these kinds of conditions, so long-term use is out …read more

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[Justin] from The Thought Emporium takes on a common molecular biology problem with these homebrew heating instruments for the DIY biology lab.

The action at the molecular biology bench boils down to a few simple tasks: suck stuff, spit stuff, cool stuff, and heat stuff. Pipettes take care of the sucking and spitting, while ice buckets and refrigerators do the cooling. The heating, however, can be problematic; vessels of various sizes need to be accommodated at different, carefully controlled temperatures. It’s not uncommon to see dozens of different incubators, heat blocks, heat plates, and even walk-in environmental chambers in the …read more

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Pyrotechnics are fun, and, with the proper precautions taken, safe enough to play with at home (usually). While it’s typical to purchase fireworks and smoke devices off the shelf, it’s actually possible to brew these up in a properly stocked home lab. [Tech Ingredients] is here to share the techniques behind producing your own super vibrant colored smoke devices at home.

Producing colored smoke requires a slightly different tack than making a simpler white smoke device. Colored smokes use dyes that are temperature sensitive, and thus the reaction temperature must be controlled carefully. This is achieved by choosing a potassium …read more

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Many people who read Hackaday hold the title of “Webmaster” but [The Thought Emporium] is after slightly different credentials with the same title. He aims to modify a strain of yeast to produce spider silk. Charlotte’s Web didn’t go into great detail about the different types of silk that a spider can produce, but the video and screencap after the break give a rundown of how spiders make different types of silk, and that each species of spider makes a unique silk. For this experiment, the desired silk is “beta sheets” which the video explains are hard and strong.

Some …read more

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[NileRed] admits that while ferrofluid has practical uses, he simply wanted to play with it and didn’t want to pay the high prices he found in Canada. A lot of the instructions he found were not for making a true ferrofluid. He set out to create the real thing, but he wasn’t entirely successful. You can see the results — which aren’t bad at all — in the video below.

We’ve always said you learn more from failure than success. The process of creating ferrofluid involves two key steps: creating coated nanoparticles of magnetite and removing particles that are too …read more

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A high school friend once related the story about how his father, a chemist for an environmental waste concern, disposed of a problematic quantity of metallic sodium by dumping it into one of the more polluted rivers in southern New England. Despite the fact that the local residents were used to seeing all manner of noxious hijinx in the river, the resulting explosion was supposedly enough to warrant a call to the police and an expeditious retreat back to the labs. It was a good story, but not especially believable back in the day.

After seeing this video of how …read more

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Affordable solid-state batteries large enough for cell phones and drones have been promised for a long time but seem to always be a few years away from production. In this case, Taiwan based Prologium sent [GreatScott] samples of their Lithium Ceramic batteries (LCBs) to test, and even though they’re not yet commercial products, who are we to refuse a peek at what they’ve been up to? They sent him two types, flexible ones (FLCBs) and higher capacity stiff ones (PLCBs).

The FLCBs were rated at 100 mAh and just 2 C, both small values but still useful for wearables, especially …read more

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Batteries placed in harm’s way need to be protected. A battery placed where a breakdown could endanger a life needs to be protected. Lithium-ion batteries on the bottoms of electric cars are subject to accidental damage and they are bathed in flame-retardant epoxy inside a metal sled. Phone batteries are hidden behind something that will shatter or snap before the battery suffers and warrant inspection. Hoverboard batteries are placed behind cheap plastic, and we have all seen how well that works. Batteries contain chemicals with a high density of energy, so the less exploding they do, the better.

Researchers at …read more

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For many projects that require control of air pressure, the usual option is to hook up a pump, maybe with a motor controller to turn it on and off, and work with that. If one’s requirements can’t be filled by that level of equipment and control, then it’s time to look at commercial regulators. [Craig Watson] did exactly that, but found the results as disappointing as they were expensive. He found that commercial offerings — especially at low pressures — tended to leak air, occasionally reported incorrect pressures, and in general just weren’t very precise. Out of a sense of …read more

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In his continuing bid to have his YouTube channel demonetized, [Cody] has decided to share how he makes chlorine gas in his lab. Because nothing could go wrong with something that uses five pounds of liquid mercury and electricity to make chlorine, hydrogen, and lye.

We’ll be the first to admit that we don’t fully understand how the Chlorine Machine works. The electrochemistry end of it is pretty straightforward – it uses electrolysis to liberate the chlorine from a brine solution. One side of the electrochemical cell generates chlorine, and one side gives off hydrogen as a byproduct. We even …read more

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Improvements in methodology have dramatically dropped the cost of DNA sequencing in the last decade. In 2007, it cost around $10 million dollars to sequence a single genome. Today, there are services which will do it for as little as $1,000. That’s not to bad if you just want to examine your own DNA, but prohibitively expensive if you’re looking to experiment with DNA in the home lab. You can buy your own desktop sequencer and cut out the middleman, but they cost in the neighborhood of $50,000. A bit outside of the experimenter’s budget unless you’re Tony Stark.

But …read more

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[Josh Starnes] had a dream. A dream of a device that could easily and naturally be activated to generate power in an emergency, or just for the heck of it. That device takes in urea, which is present in urine, and uses it to generate a useful electrical charge. [Josh] has, of course, named this device the P Cell.

An early proof of concept uses urine to create a basic galvanic cell with zinc and copper electrodes, but [Josh] has other ideas for creating a useful amount of electricity with such a readily-available substance. For example, the urea could be …read more

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You may think electrochemistry sounds like an esoteric field where lab-coated scientists labor away over sophisticated instruments and publish papers that only other electrochemists could love. And you’d be right, but only partially, because electrochemistry touches almost everything in modern life. For proof of that look no further than your nearest pocket, assuming that’s where you keep your smartphone and the electrochemical cell that powers it.

Electrochemistry is the study of the electrical properties of chemical reactions and does indeed need sophisticated instrumentation. That doesn’t mean the instruments have to break the grant budget, though, as [Kyle Lopin] shows with …read more

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These Fluid Displacement Thermal Actuators designed by [Andrew Benson] are a delightful and profoundly different approach to the Power Harvesting Challenge portion of The Hackaday Prize. While most projects were focused on electrical power, [Andrew]’s design is essentially a mechanical motor that harnesses the fact that Phase Change Materials (PCMs) change volume when they go from liquid to solid or vice-versa; that property is used to provide a useful hydraulic force. In short, it’s a linear actuator that retracts and expands as the PCM freezes or melts. By choosing a material with melting and freezing temperatures that are convenient for …read more

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Battery cells work by chemical reactions, and the fascinating Hybrid Microbial Fuel Cell design by [Josh Starnes] is no different. True, batteries don’t normally contain life, but the process coughs up useful electrons all the same; 1.7 V per cell in [Josh]’s design, to be precise. His proof of concept consists of eight cells in parallel, enough to give his cell phone a charge via a DC-DC boost converter. He says it’s not known how long this can be expected to last before the voltage drops to an unusable level, but it works!

There are two complementary sides to …read more

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Old solutions are often so elegant and effective that they keep coming back. The gasometer, or gas holder, is one such example. Now [NightHawkInLight] has built one for storing the wood gas he’s been experimenting with, and it’s pretty neat to watch it rise and fall as he first adds gas and then burns it off. The mechanism couldn’t be simpler.

For those who, like us, are hearing about this low tech for the first time, gasometers are a means of safely storing gas stemming from the 1700s when gas was king and electricity was little more than a gentleman …read more

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When you saw the picture for this article, did you think of a peacock’s feather? These fibers are not harvested from birds, and in fact, the colors come from transparent rubber. As with peacock feathers, they come from the way light reflects off layers of differing materials, this is known as optical interference, and it is the same effect seen on oil slicks. The benefit to using transparent rubber is that the final product is flexible and when drawn, the interference shifts. In short, they change color when stretched.

Most of the sensors we see and feature are electromechanical, which …read more

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Modern display and solar cell technologies are built with a material called Indium Tin Oxide (ITO). ITO has excellent optical transparency and electrical conductivity, and the material properties needed for integration in large-scale manufacturing. However, we’re not content with just merely “good enough” nowadays, and need better materials to build ever better devices. Graphene and carbon nanotubes have been considered as suitable replacements, but new research has identified a different possibility: nanowires.

Researchers from the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS) and the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN) in Ireland have demonstrated a seamless …read more

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When engineering a solution to a problem, an often-successful approach is to keep the design as simple as possible. Simple things are easier to produce, maintain, and use. Whether you’re building a robot, operating system, or automobile, this type of design can help in many different ways. Now, researchers at MIT’s Little Devices Lab have taken this philosophy to testing for various medical conditions, using a set of modular blocks.

Each block is designed for a specific purpose, and can be linked together with other blocks. For example, one block may be able to identify Zika virus, and another block …read more

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A few days ago we brought you news of [Sam Zeloof]’s amazing achievement, of creating the first home-made lithographically produced integrated circuit. It was a modest enough design in a simple pair of differential amplifiers and all we had to go on was a Twitter announcement, but it promised a more complete write-up to follow. We’re pleased to note that the write-up has arrived, and we can have a look at some of the details of just how he managed to produce an IC in his garage. He’s even given it a part number, the Zeloof Z1.

For ease of …read more

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It is now six decades since the first prototypes of practical integrated circuits were produced. We are used to other technological inventions from the 1950s having passed down the food chain to the point at which they no longer require the budget of a huge company or a national government to achieve, but somehow producing an integrated circuit has remained out of reach. It’s the preserve of the Big Boys, move on, there’s nothing to see here.

Happily for us there exists a dedicated band of experimenters keen to break that six-decade dearth of home-made ICs. And now one of …read more

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It looks like a tube made of glass but it’s actually aluminum. Well, aluminum with an asterisk beside it — this is not elemental aluminum but rather a material made using it.

We got onto the buzz about “transparent aluminum” as a result of a Tweet from whence the image above came. This Tweet was posted by [Jo Pitesky], a Science Systems Engineer at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. [Jo] reported that at a recent JPL technology open house she had the chance to handle a tube of material that looks for all the world like a section of …read more

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Recently, one of [Eric]’s clients asked him to design a bottle. Simple enough for a product designer, except that the client needed it to thread into a specific type of cap. And no, they don’t know the specs.

But that’s no problem, thought [Eric] as he turned on the exhaust fan and reached for the secret ingredient that would make casting the negative image of the threads a breeze. He mixed up the foul-smelling body filler with the requisite hardener and some lovely cyan toner powder and packed it into the cap with a tongue depressor. Then he capped off …read more

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Some of the creepy-crawlers under our feet, flitting through the air, and waiting on silk webs, incorporate metals into their rigid body parts and make themselves harder. Like Mega Man, they absorb the metals to improve themselves. In addition to making their bodies harder, silk-producing creatures like worms and spiders can spin webs with augmented properties. These silks can be conductive, insulating, or stronger depending on the doping elements.

At Italy’s University of Trento, they are pushing the limits and dosing spiders with single-wall carbon nanotubes and graphene. The carbon is suspended in water and sprayed into the spider’s habitat. …read more

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A group of researchers have figured out how to produce graphene using a DVD drive. This discovery helps clear the path for mass production of the substance, which was discovered in the late 1980′s. More recently, the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to a team that produced two-dimensional graphene; a substance one just [...]

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From what we’ve seen we’d say [Jianyi Liu] is really good at etching PCBs at home. Now you can learn from his experience. He just published a mammoth guide to fabricating your own PCBs at home. That link goes to his index page which leads to all eight parts of the guide. He starts off by [...]

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There are a ton of benefits for etching your own circuit boards at home, chief among them the ability to design a circuit in the morning and have a prototype in your hand by lunch. There’s always the question of how to etch the board, but [NurdRage] over on Youtube has all the chemistry covered on [...]

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These water droplets are not falling; they’re actually stuck in place. What we’re seeing is the effects of an acoustic levitator. The device was initially developed by NASA to simulate microgravity. Now it’s being used by the pharmaceutical industry do develop better drugs. The two parts of the apparatus seen in the image above are [...]

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When a project starts off by heating acid to its boiling point we say no thanks. But then again we’re more for the projects that use ones and zeros or a hot soldering iron. If you’re comfortable with the chemistry like [Michail] this might be right up your alley. He used boiling acid to expose [...]

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Copper bus bars are commonly used instead of wire for carrying high currents. [Dane] needed some bus bars for a project, but he was worried about corrosion. His solution was tin electroplating the bus bars to lower the risk of corrosion while keeping the conductivity high. The process requires only two chemicals: hydrochloric acid and tin. [...]

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For the few double-sided PCBs we’ve actually etched at home we simply soldered a piece of wire to either side of a via and clipped off the excess. But if you want to go the extra mile you can’t beat electroplated through holes. The setup seen above is an electroplating tank build from simple materials which [...]

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A Brewster Angle Microscope (BAM) can run you around $100,000. If you don’t have that lying around you could just use some LEGO pieces to build your own. Having been faced with no budget to buy the hardware, and needing the data to finish his PhD, [Matthew] figured out a way to build something passable on [...]

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If you plan ahead a little bit you could have your own system of water purification to use in emergencies. Everyone needs clean drinking water and this gadget will let your produce your own purification drops quite easily. The solution contains chlorine, which is created through electrolysis. The PVC cap seen near the bottom of [...]

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We are fascinated by the hybrid rocket engine which [Ben Krasnow] built and tested in his shop. It is actually using a hollow cylinder of acrylic as the fuel, with gaseous oxygen as an oxidizer. We’re already quite familiar with solid rocket propellant, but this hybrid approach is much different. When a rocket motor using solid propellant [...]

Tags:  fuel engine rocket ben-krasnow hybrid-rocket-engine solid-rocket-propellant solid-propellant chemistry hacks  

This cloud chamber is designed to keep the environment friendly for observing ionizing radiation. The group over at the LVL1 Hackerspace put it together and posted everything you need to know to try it out for yourself. A cloud chamber uses a layer of alcohol vapor as a visual indicator of ionizing particles. As the [...]

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We took Geology in college. It was pretty cool learning about the hardness of different minerals. But there were no explosions involved. We’re not entirely sure what this class is, perhaps Chemistry, maybe Physics, but we want in. [Dr. Roy Lowry] wows the class with a bomb made of liquid nitrogen. The demonstration was part [...]

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[Tom] needed more solder flux and instead of buying it he thought he’d try making his own. The thing is, he didn’t have any rosin on hand. But knowing its source let him acquire it for free. He took a sample of tree sap and turned it into his own solder flux. We’ve seen a [...]

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In the late 1940s, the US Naval Research Laboratory used a few German-built V2 rockets to study cosmic rays from above Earth’s atmosphere. To do this, a nitrogen-powered cloud chamber was fitted inside the nose cone of these former missiles, sent aloft, and photographed every 25 seconds during flight. When [Markus] read about these experiments, he thought [...]

Tags:  naval cloud researching markus v2-rockets cloud-chambers naval-research-laboratory chemistry hacks  

It turns out that old newsprint can be a bit explosive; at least when it’s combined with the proper ingredients. [Markus Bindhammer] worked out a way to make solid rocket propellant from newspaper. Judging from the test footage after the break the home made engines work great! There isn’t a long list of ingredients. In [...]

Tags:  newspaper propellant rocket markus-bindhammer solid-rocket-propellant proper-ingredients test-footage chemistry hacks  

[Markus Bindhammer] recently made a discovery while conduction chemistry experiments in his home lab. Ascorbic acid can be used to detect the presence of Vanillin. The reaction starts as a color change, from a clear liquid to a dark green. When he continued to heat the mixture he ended up with the surface crystallization seen above. [...]

Tags:  vanillin presence vitamin markus-bindhammer chemistry-experiments crystallization chemistry hacks  

Apparently being overrun by ripe Passion Fruit is a problem if you live in Hawaii. [Ryan K's] solution to the situation was to use his extra fruit to power a laser. In an experiment that would make [Walter White] proud, [Ryan] gathered everyday supplies to form a battery based on the fruit. He used some [...]

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Aside from wanting to play around with nitric acid, [Ben] really didn’t have a reason to decap a few 74xx and 4000-series logic chips. Not that we mind, as he provides a great tutorial at looking at a bare IC that isn’t covered in epoxy and resin. Most ICs are encased in a hard epoxy [...]

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The University of Glasgow has released a Chemistry research paper covering the applicational process of printing pharmaceutical compounds. Yes thats correct actually printing medication. Using various feedstock of chemicals they see a future where manufacturing your medication from home will be possible. Using standard 3D printing technology it is possible to assemble pre-filled “vessels” in [...]

Tags:  printing reactionware medication pharmaceutical-compounds chemistry-research university-of-glasgow chemistry hacks  

[Shahriar Shahramian] is playing with some liquid nitrogen in order to see how various components react to extremely low temperatures. After the break you will find forty-one minutes of video in which he conducts and explains each experiment. This does have practical applications. If you’re designing hardware for use in space you definitely need to [...]

Tags:  shahramian shahriar measuring liquid-nitrogen cold-temperatures practical-applications chemistry hacks  

Here [Catarina Mota] is showing off a ring of magnetic ink printed on a piece of paper. It’s strong enough to hold a disc magnet in place when the paper is raised vertically. This strength comes from mixing your own batch of ink. Magnetic ink has been around a long time and is most often [...]

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[POTUS31] had a need for anodized titanium, but the tried and true “submersion” method was not going to work out well for what he was trying to do. In order to create the look he wanted he had to get creative with some tape, a laser cutter, Coke, and a whole lot of 9v batteries. [...]

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The Nyan Cat you see above is only 600 micrometers from head to tail. To put that into perspective, that’s about 10 times the diameter of a human hair. Also, that Nyan is etched into 200 nanometer thick copper foil and is the work of the HomeCMOS team, who is developing a hobbyist-friendly process to make [...]

Tags:  head nyan home cat thick-copper copper-foil integrated-circuits chemistry hacks  

[GuShH] wrote a guide for making your own rosin-based solder flux. According to [Stephen] — who sent in the tip and tried this method himself — is works well, it’s cheap, but you will need to clean up a bit after using it on a PCB. Only two ingredients are necessary to make your own [...]

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Here’s an LED indicator which was made at home out of a Silicon Carbide (SiC) crystal. The concept is simple, but a bit of trial and error goes into getting that tiny amber spot to light up. The guesswork comes in finding the right piece of crystal. First [KOS] broke it into tiny pieces, then he [...]

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What do those colorful iPod Nano cases have in common with sapphires? In both substances the color is not on the surface, but integrated in the structure of the material. As usually, [Bill Hammack] unveils the interesting concepts behind coloring metal through anodization in his latest Engineer Guy episode. We’re not strangers to the anodization process. [...]

Tags:  ipod anodization color bill-hammack guy nano ipod-nano-cases sapphires chemistry hacks  

This glowing LED is proof that the experiments [Nvermeer] is doing with conductive ink are working. We’re filing this one as a chemistry hack because  you need to hit the lab ahead of time in order to get the conductivity necessary for success. He reports that this technique uses a copper powder suspended in an epoxy [...]

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Nearly everything at [HAD] is at least based on science in some way or another. If, however, you would like to do some actual scientific experiments with stuff around the house, [Observationsblog] might be for you. The particular posts that [Ken] wrote in to tell us about were all about acids, bases, and natural indicators. [...]

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Flux generally makes our lives easier. It’s the best bet when trying to prevent solder bridges with fine-pitch components like you see here. But it is also indispensable when it comes to desoldering components from a board (we’re talking just one component without disturbing all of the others). But have you ever looked at what it costs [...]

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[William Finucane] is making his own litmus paper by harnessing the power of cabbage. The process is much easier than the faux gunpowder he made, as it take just the one ingredient and a few kitchen tools. In case you’ve forgotten your High School chemistry, Litmus is a set of dyes that change color when [...]

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Modern society owes so much to medical research, though what happens behind the scenes in a laboratory is usually far less than glamorous. A group of scientists at the University of Cambridge are working to develop synthetic bone tissue, but the process to create the samples used in the study is incredibly tedious. To make [...]

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[linux-works] picked up an old power supply from eBay, and as it was built back in the 60’s or 70’s, it was in need of a little TLC. One thing that immediately caught his eye was the condition of the knobs, dials, and banana plug receptacles – they were dull and faded, showing off 40+ [...]

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Looks like ice-cube trays are once again proving their versatility as this one is serving as the vessel for a home made lead-acid battery. With a collection of uniformly sized non-conductive containers, it makes the perfect base for a set of small cells. This project is the culmination of a Hackerspace class about batteries, and [...]

Tags:  use ice shocking conductive-containers lead-acid-battery culmination chemistry hacks  

[Gil] recently wrote in to tell us about some awesome research going on at UCLA. Apparently by layering some oxidized graphite onto a DVD and tossing it into a lightscribe burner, it’s possible to print your own super capacitors; some pretty high capacity ones at that. For those that are unaware, supercapcaitors are typically made [...]

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[Adric Menning] has an unfortunate allergy. He’s allergic to chocolate. Instead of eating the stuff, he’s using it to build model rocket engines. The project stems from the Quelab Hackerspace’s chocolate hacking challenge which spawned a number of interesting hacks. [Adric's] doesn’t use pure chocolate (an experiment with a Hershey’s bar was a bust) but [...]

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When the zombiepocalypse comes you’re not going to want to run out to the store for more ammo. But you can always reload great grandpa’s musket with some homemade gunpowder. All kidding aside, the invention and proliferation of gunpowder had a profound effect on the world. Here you can see just how easy it is [...]

Tags:  brewing household gunpowder homemade-gunpowder household-products musket chemistry hacks  

We don’t really have any titanium lying around, it’s not exactly a cheap material. But this hack that shows you how to anodize titanium in your home laboratory (or kitchen for that matter) and it might help the metal make its way into a future project. It seems the process is not overly difficult or [...]

Tags:  titanium home anodize cheap-material home-laboratory future-project chemistry hacks  

[Jordan] likes the flexibility that conductive inks offer when putting together electronic circuits, but says that they are often too expensive to purchase in decent quantities, and that they usually require substrate-damaging temperatures to cure. After reading a UIUC Materials Research Lab article about making conductive ink that anneals at relatively low temperatures, he decided [...]

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When we hear about etching PCBs at home we assume that either Ferric Chloride or Cupric Chloride were used to eat away unmasked copper from the boards. But [Quinn Dunki] just wrote up her PCB etching guide and she doesn’t use either of those. Instead, she combines vinegar, hydrogen peroxide, and salt. It’s easier to find vinegar than muriatic [...]

Tags:  etching chloride vinegar etching-pcbs quinn-dunki hydrogen-peroxide chemistry hacks  

If you have ever produced your own PCBs at home, you know that it can be somewhat of a time consuming process. Spending 20 or so minutes manually agitating a board is a drag, and while aquarium bubbler setups improve the process, they are far from ideal. [Christian Reed] knew that if he really wanted [...]

Tags:  machine spray process christian-reed bubbler pcbs aquarium chemistry hacks  

In our younger and more vulnerable years nothing was greater than visiting a museum, going to the gift shop, and badgering our parents to buy a pack of astronaut ice cream. Freeze dried ice cream leaves a taste of nostalgic chalky sweetness in our mouths, so we’re very excited to see that [Ben Krasnow] is now making [...]

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This is a Digital Salinometer which [Daniel Kramnik] built as a Science Olympiad entry. He’s a Junior in High School and when looking for a project to enter into the Water Quality event he was interested in achieving greater accuracy than a mechanical hydrometer provides. We think the circuit design is very impressive for anyone [...]

Tags:  olympiad science salinometer daniel-kramnik water-quality-event science-olympiad chemistry hacks  

If you’ve ever thought about extracting caffeine from coffee beans, [Ben] is the guy for you. The last time we ran into him, he had already produced a few aerogel monoliths with a few chemicals, pipe fittings, and some CO2. We’re guessing he needed another use for his supercritical drying chamber, so after looking over a few patents, [...]

Tags:  coffee caffeine home ben few-chemicals drying-chamber coffee-beans chemistry hacks  

Who needs chemistry when a little bit of physics will do? Instead of brewing up a batch of weak adhesive to make his own post-it notes, [Valentin] built this handheld device to add an electrostatic charge to bits of paper. Just give them a couple of seconds to charge and they’ll stick to the wall [...]

Tags:  scrap paper chemistry valentin electrostatic-charge handheld-device volts misc hacks  

[LucidMovement] was looking for some crystal-based artwork and just couldn’t seem to find anything that fit the bill, so he decided to build something himself. The inspiration for his desk lamp came from something we’re all familiar with, a DNA double-helix. To grow the crystals he built a helix-shaped growing substrate out of nichrome and [...]

Tags:  something lamp dna dna-double-helix dna-helix desk-lamp chemistry hacks  

Back during the Renaissance, great artists like Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael would create their own paints. Of course paint is very cheap and readily available, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make your own paint by playing with chemistry. Last summer, [Sean] at the Philly hackerspace Hive76 did some experiments with ferrofluids. For these experiments [...]

Tags:  paint renaissance chemistry sean leonardo raphael inorganic-chemistry ferrofluids great-artists hacks  

[Ben] outdid himself. He successfully made monoliths of silica aerogel in his garage. Aerogel, the light-weight solid that has been referred to as ‘hard air’ is really freaking expensive especially in non-granulated form. The techniques behind producing aerogels have been on the Internet for a fairly long time. A few uncommon chemicals and a supercritical [...]

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Are you feeling a little MacGyver-ish and have access to a film camera? Perhaps you want to try developing your pictures using coffee and vitamin C instead of a traditional developing solution. [Danish Puthan Valiyandi] does a great job of walking us through the steps he took, including precise measurements, temperatures, and timings involved in [...]

Tags:  vitamin coffee film puthan precise-measurements film-camera chemistry hacks  

While many people have tried their hand at anodizing aluminum at home, there are plenty who would just as soon leave it up to the professionals due to the highly concentrated sulfuric acid required for the process. [Ken] started thinking about the process and wondered if there was a way to get comparable results using [...]

Tags:  aluminum acid process ken comparable-results battery-acid chemistry hacks  

What to make your own chemiluminescent material? Check out this process that uses common household goods to synthesize luminol. You’ll need some lab equipment, and [NurdRage] mentions some precautions to take as luminol is not itself toxic, but some of the fumes and intermediary chemicals found during the process are. Start by cutting up some [...]

Tags:  luminol household process household-chemicals material-check chemistry hacks  

A commercial potentiostat can cost several thousand dollars, but the CheapStat is an open source project that makes it possible to build your own at a tiny fraction of that cost. It is possible to build one for less than $80, breaking down the cost barrier faced by many labs that would like to have [...]

Tags:  cheapstat cost potentiostat open-source-project several-thousand-dollars tiny-fraction chemistry hacks  

All “methane generator” jokes aside, This one actually serves a useful purpose. Although not an engine hack per se, methane can be used to run an engine. As the traditional method of powering an internal combustion engine, gasoline, gets more and more expensive, alternatives will have to be found. If you happen to live on [...]

Tags:  engine generator methane internal-combustion-engine gasoline chemistry hacks  

The magnum opus of alchemy was the Philosopher’s stone, a substance that was able to turn common metals into gold. Unlike alchemists, [Carl Willis] might not be poisoning himself in a multitude of ways, but he did build a Farnsworth fusor that’s capable of turning Hydrogen into Helium. To fuse Hydrogen in his device, [Carl] [...]

Tags:  high hydrogen voltage carl-willis carl farnsworth-fusor magnum-opus alchemists chemistry hacks  

[Leafcutter] is big in to making music and has put together all sorts of musical instruments and tools over the years. Recently, he was inspired to make his own piezo crystals, and wrote in to share the results of his experiments with us. [Leafcutter] is no stranger to messing around with piezo elements, and after [...]

Tags:  contact piezo leafcutter piezo-elements piezo-crystals stranger chemistry hacks  

[Robovergne] prides himself on the beautiful reef aquarium that he has set up in his home. These sorts of water displays require constant maintenance due to the mineral requirements of living coral. Rather than add mineral solutions manually, he decided to build a nano-doser using espresso machine pumps (Google Translation). These vibration pumps run on mains [...]

Tags:  automated aquarium mineral reef-aquarium mineral-solutions espresso-machine chemistry hacks  

Instructables user [killbox] seems to have come across a process that actually makes magnetic silly putty “better”, depending on your specific needs. He had tons of fun making a batch of magnetic putty, but thought that the addition of iron oxide made it stiff and a bit slow moving for his tastes. He tried to [...]

Tags:  instructables putty enhance silly-putty personal-lubricants killbox chemistry hacks  

“Wednesday, I was arrested and sent to jail,” is what your blog might say if you decide to try and duplicate this project.  You may, however, be fortunate to be still writing your blog, as ATTEMPTING TO BUILD YOUR OWN REACTOR can be quite dangerous. That’s what [Richard] did using household items such as clock [...]

Tags:  reactor blog diy richard nuclear-reactor household-items clock chemistry hacks  

Reader [Andre] sent in a link which tells us all about this “cool” Copper Oxide Thermoelectric Generator. All you need is a bit of solid copper wire and a gas torch. Burn the wire so it gets a nice coating of oxide. From there, it is a matter of making the 2 sections of burned [...]

Tags:  copper wire oxide andre gas-torch copper-oxide thermoelectric-generator chemistry hacks  

[Bruce Land] is a professor at Cornell University who was looking for a way to quickly solve chemical kinetic systems. He had used MATLAB but longed for a faster method. His upgrade achieves a 100 times speed increase by using an FPGA as a parallel stochastic solver. It works by generating 100 pseudo-random 16-bit numbers [...]

Tags:  modelling fpga chemical cornell-university kinetic-systems speed-increase chemistry hacks  

What’s that you say? You’ve got rigid materials that change their shape when exposed to electric current? Sign us up for some! Although the fabrication process looks a bit daunting, we love the results of working with electro-active polymers. These are sheets of plastic that can flex by contracting in one direction when the juice [...]

Tags:  shape change electro-active rigid-materials polymers chemistry hacks  

[Andrey Mikhalchuk] is trying to gather a base set of lab instruments. Specifically, he’s looking for hardware that will let him quickly filter solids out of a liquid. He first started by adding a cotton disk to a plastic funnel. It does the job, but when left to gravity it’s quite slow. He needed a [...]

Tags:  lab mikhalchuk andrey plastic-funnel lab-instruments solids chemistry hacks  

The image above is a screen capture from a video clip where the black ooze gobbles up that rare-earth magnet. It’s actually a blob of Silly Putty which was slightly altered to add magnetic properties. [Mikeasaur] grabbed some ferric iron oxide powder from an art supply store and donned gloves and a dust mask while massaging it [...]

Tags:  magnetism fun putty rare-earth-magnet iron-oxide-powder art-supply-store chemistry hacks  

Pop a few aluminum bits into this little RC racer and you’ll have power for around forty minutes. This concept, which has been patented, is the result of a college research project. It uses a chemical reaction between aqueous Sodium Hydroxide and aluminum. The result of that reaction is hydrogen, which is gathered and directed [...]

Tags:  aluminum result reaction sodium-hydroxide rc-racer chemical-reaction chemistry hacks  

HackHut user [lackawanna] is looking to start his own compost pile, but as many urban composters discover, things can get quite smelly if you don’t manage it properly. The process of composting is broken up into two phases, aerobic and anaerobic decomposition. The former is the first stage to occur and produces plenty of heat, [...]

Tags:  temperature heap compost compost-heap compost-pile temperature-logger chemistry hacks  

While reading the back of a tube a toothpaste [Underling] noticed that one of the ingredients was hydrated silica, gears turned, sparks flew and he wondered if he could possibly make a transistor out of the stuff. After thinking about it he decided that making a diode out of toothpaste would be easier and still [...]

Tags:  toothpaste back diode hydrated-silica underling chemistry hacks  

[Collin] loves piezos – and why not? According to him, they are about as close to magic as you can find in the world. We can’t really disagree on that one – there’s something oddly enchanting about piezoelectric materials. Most commercially used piezoelectric devices that you find today are constructed out of man-made ceramic materials [...]

Tags:  piezo cooking home collin piezoelectric-devices piezoelectric-materials piezo-crystals chemistry hacks  

[Stephen] often finds the need to make his own PCBs at home, and when he got the urge to do some etching recently, he realized that he was fresh out of “Ferret Chloride and Bureaucratic Acid*.” Undeterred by his empty chemical cabinet, he poked around in his kitchen mixing together anything and everything that might [...]

Tags:  pcb etchant simple stephen pcbs ferret chemistry hacks  

  [Kenneth] and [Jeff] spent a weekend building a cloud chamber. This is a detection device for radiation particles that are constantly bombarding the earth. It works by creating an environment of supersaturated alcohol vapor which condenses when struck by a particle travelling through the container, leaving a wispy trail behind. This was done on the cheap, [...]

Tags:  chamber cloud weekend jeff kenneth cloud-chamber particle particles chemistry hacks  

Remember how fun it was studying chemistry and physics in high school? Well we guess your recollection depends on the person who taught the class. Why not have another go at it by learning the A-to-Z of electronics from one of our favorite teachers, [Jeri Ellsworth]. You know, the person who whips up chemistry experiments [...]

Tags:  paper chemistry person chemistry-experiments paper-dolls ellsworth misc hacks  

[Grenadier] had a piece of silicon carbide sitting around that he planned to use when making a primitive diode called a Cat’sWhisker Diode. While probing he noticed that one of the crystals threw off a bit of light. He popped it off and used JB Weld to attach it to a brass plate. The peculiar [...]

Tags:  accidental led diode cat silicon-carbide brass-plate chemistry hacks  

[cmwslw] built a soda-bottle water rocket that uses the ignition of oxyhydrogen gas to quickly expel the water, as opposed to the usual compressed air and water mixture. His project contains excellent documentation with photos and it builds on other articles he’s written about generating the flammable HHO gas used to launch his craft into [...]

Tags:  oxyhydrogen rocket water hho-gas water-mixture soda-bottle chemistry hacks  

What can you make with a toilet paper roll, duct tape, and a graphing calculator? A stand for your homemade spectrometer. This is neither as pretty nor as accurate as a precision scientific instrument, but that doesn’t mean it’s useless. In fact, it works perfectly well for rudimentary observations. Light is shined through a sample [...]

Tags:  paper toilet spectrophotometer toilet-paper-roll graphing-calculator scientific-instrument chemistry hacks  

[Sprite_TM] built a full clock display using thermochromic paint. This picks up where he left off with his paint-based 7-segment display prototype. He never really saw that design through to a finished project, but he recently came across the leftover paint and decided to do something with it. Instead of making thin traces on a [...]

Tags:  paint display clock clock-face leftover-paint finished-project chemistry hacks  

We know that you can transform the mechanical motions of your body into electrical energy, like when you turn the crank or shake a mechanically-powered flashlight. These types of mechanical motions are quite large compared to many of the day-to-day (and minute-to-minute) actions you perform–for example walking, breathing, and thumb wrestling. What if we could [...]

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[Jeri Ellsworth] has put together a couple of videos that cover how she made her own organic light emitting diodes, or OLEDs. In the first video, after the break, it discusses the difference between regular, rigid semiconductor LEDs and organic LEDs. The video then goes on to show how to make an OLED as successive [...]

Tags:  video leds oleds organic-light-emitting-diodes jeri-ellsworth light-emitting-diodes chemistry hacks  

If you’re into developing your own photographs you might try mixing your own emulsion. [Jimmy Hartnett] worked out the chemical reaction necessary to make a photosensitive medium using Silver Chloride. His process lets him manufacture canvas that can be use like photo paper. The gist of it involves coating the back of a canvas with [...]

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A failed chemistry experiment led [Jeri Ellsworth] to discover a flexible substrate for electroluminescent displays. We’re familiar with EL displays on the back of a glass panel like you would find in an audio receiver, but after making a mesh from aluminum foil [Jeri] looked at using the porous metal to host phosphors. She starts by cleaning [...]

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This is a ball mill used for refining materials into a fine powder. [Jpoopdog] built it in two parts, a base and the tumbler chamber. The base itself is build using LEGO wheels as rollers. The motor and controller from an NXT kit is used to drive the rotation, with programming to stop the mill [...]

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[Jeri Ellsworth] continues her experiments with electroluminescence, this time she’s making EL ink. The ink she’s looking for is Zinc Sulfate in a solution. The process she chose is to re-dope some glow powder so that it can be excited by the field around an AC current. In her video (embedded after the break) she talks about the [...]

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Ditch that old toaster oven and move to the next level of surface mount soldering with this vapor phase reflow method. [Ing.Büro R.Tschaggelar] put together this apparatus to use vapor phase reflow at his bench instead of sending out his smaller projects for assembly. It uses the heating element from an electric tea kettle to [...]

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If you follow Instructables.com, it might seem like every third article lately is about Sugru, the nifty air-drying silicone putty that’s good for all manner of repairs and custom parts. It’s fantastic stuff (and we love their slogan, “Hack things better”), but one can’t (yet!) just drop in on any local hardware store to buy a quick [...]

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Further solidifying her mad-scientist persona, [Jeri Ellsworth] is making glow powder with household chemicals. When we saw the title of the video we though it would be fun to try it ourselves, but the first few minutes scared that out of us. To gather the raw materials she puts some pennies in a bench motor [...]

Tags:  sulfide glow zinc zinc-sulfide jeri-ellsworth household-chemicals chemistry hacks  

[KoD] and [Navic] are building solid propellant motors using sugar and potassium nitrate. They cook up the two ingredients along with water and a bonding agent. They find that corn syrup is particularly good for bonding and that cooking the strange brew is more of an artform than science. Either way, the video after the [...]

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ChemHacker has posted schematics and code for a scanning tunneling microscope. [Sacha De'Angeli] finalized the proof-of-concept design for version 0.1 and released all of the information under the Gnu general public license version 3. You’ll need to build a sensor from a combination of a needle, a piezo, and a ring of magnets. There’s an analog [...]

Tags:  version microscope scanning gnu-general-public-license scanning-tunneling-microscope proof-of-concept chemistry hacks  

[Jeri's] back with a series of videos that outlines the step-by-step electroluminescent wire manufacturing, making EL panels from PCBs, and assembling power supplies for EL hardware. These concepts are actually quite approachable, something we don’t expect from someone who makes their own integrated circuits at home. The concept here is that an alternating current traveling [...]

Tags:  wire power jeri electroluminescent-wire integrated-circuits pcbs chemistry hacks  

[Jeri Ellsworth] adds electroluminescent wire to the list of things she makes. The materials list is incredibly low. The common components are epoxy coated magnet wire for the center conductor and bare wire for the second conductor. The part you don’t have on hand is phosphors, although she does link to a source. The bad [...]

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As part of his Master’s dissertation [Salvador Faria] built a sensor suite for wine monitoring. He needed to develop a method of tracking data inside the wine cask during the vinification process. What he came up with eclipses the wine cellar temperature monitors we’ve seen before. He picked up pH, temperature, carbon dioxide, alcohol, and relative humidity [...]

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[Aleksander Zawada] makes vacuum tubes in his home. One of the most challenging builds he has taken on is to produce a working Nixie tube. He describes the process in a PDF, covering his success and failure. It seems the hardest part is to get the tube filled with the proper gas, at the proper [...]

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Even if you have no interest in making these yourself, you might enjoy this educational instructable about making your own glow sticks. Comprised of a very short list of chemicals, all available online, the process is fairly simple. If you’re feeling like you want to take on a little more complicated chemistry project, you can [...]

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[James] is interested in reverse engineering some integrated circuits. One of the biggest hurdles in this process has always been just getting to the guts of the chip. He used acetone to dissolve the plastic case but had trouble getting through the epoxy blob. Commonly, the epoxy is soaked in nitric acid for a few [...]

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Unlike many chemistry projects we post here, making magnetite nanocrystals doesn’t require anything that can’t be found in a local grocery store. All that is required is oil, vinegar, crystal drain opener, and rust. We don’t recognize the specific brand of drain cleaner that they are using, but we’re sure that you could find one [...]

Tags:  magnetite drain chemistry chemistry-projects oil-vinegar local-grocery-store hacks