So I want to run some experiments that need small amounts of ammonia gas. I was already looking to use off gassing from ammonium hydroxide, when I ran across this video about creating small quantities of ammonia gas for lab experiments. It has a good explanation and a better procedure than I had intended to use.
Looking at the other videos from FlinnScientific, they have posted a few awesome demonstrations and experiments. Check out their “Whoosh Bottle” for one to get kids attention!
So as Dr. T showed in our earlier posts – we are using a distillation kit from Amazon to get us started.
The only problem is that the kit is supposed to be cooled from water running from a tap, through the Graham condenser, and down the drain. My not wanting to waste water aside, I don’t have a sink in my shop. So we rigged up a heat sink suitable for the same tubing running into and out of the Graham condenser, and added a thermos to act as an ice bath.
A small pump cycles the water from the ice bath, through the Graham condenser, through the heat sink, and then back into the ice bath. We add a few ice cubes to the bath to get it started and then let things cool from there. To that we added a
Peltier Thermo-Electric cooling module from Adafruit. That keeps pumping heat out of the system. We just grabbed the tubing from the hardware store.
Here’s video of Dr. T talking us through the setup we ended up using.
In this episode Dr. T is explaining the distillation equipment we are setting up. The goal of the project is to use an alcohol powered distiller to create alcohol in order to re-load the lamp. The project is a two-for-one. This year we are learning about distillation and the states of matter. Next summer we get to use the same setup to look at conservation of energy.
So my degrees are in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, so working as Dr. T’s lab assistant, or Igor as he insists on calling me, is the first time I have been playing with “the wet stuff” in decades. As a result I didn’t already have the gear we would need. I went with a distillation kit from Amazon to get us started.
The kit comes with a boiling flask, a Graham condenser, and an Erlenmeyer flask ground to fit together. Just as important it comes with stands and hardware to hold them.
The only problem is that the kit is supposed to be cooled from water running from a tap and down the drain. My not wanting to waste water aside, I don’t have a sink in my shop. So we rigged up a heat sink suitable for the same tubing running into and out of the Graham condenser, and added a thermos to act as an ice bath. Dr. T will be covering that in the next post.
For now, here is Dr. T explaining the initial setup of our apparatus.
The baking soda volcano has been a classic in the Tony house for decades. Basically you mix baking soda and white vinegar then watch things erupt.
The main component of vinegar is acetic acid CH3COOH. Baking soda is NaHC03. When you mix them you get:
CH3C00H + NaHC03 => (CH3C00-)(Na+) + H20 + C02
That C02 being released is the cause of the fizzing. The food coloring is just a nice touch to give things the color of lava.
Here is my nephew Dr. T explaining things.
The Makiwara has done more to clean up my strikes than anything else. It regularly teaches me new thigns and shows me how things I thought I understood were wrong.
Well karate has a number of finger and nuckle strikes that I have only recently gotten to the point where I have added them to my stiking practice. Only problem is even soft strikes just killed my fingers. My sensei showed me a neat trick to work on my finger strikes. Basically you hang a punching target from the makiwara, then do your strikes against the pad. After a few months I was able to work up to striking the naked makiwara.
The big problem I am trying to figure out currently is my pinky finger hanging out from my hand during the strike. It does not seem to impact the stike, but I cant help thinking that having the one finger separated from my hand has the potential for it to get hung up on the harget or broken.
Now that I am regularly practicing Nukite, I can see how I am doing it wroge all over the place. Pinan Shodan for example has a Nukite strike to the throat, and I can now see I was just thrusting with a knife hand during the kata. My finger position was all wrong. So now I need to fix my Kata and my strikes.
The Makiwara is one of the tools of traditional Karate training that fell out of widespread use as Karate moved out of Japan. I would be surprised if 5% of the Karate dojos in the United States actually have a Makiwara in them, which frankly is unfortunate since the Makiwara is probably the single most instructive tool for learning how to strike properly.
Given how uncomment they are – I was pleasantly surprised to find “How to Protect Yourself with Karate” today in a used bookstore. I still need to read through it, but what caught my eye – and why I bought the book to read was their unusual use of Makiwara.
They book showed using an ironing board as a make shift Makiwara in the home. The book is old enough (1966) that I think the assumption was that women would be housewives, and need to train out of the house. Hard to believe that was only one to two generations ago.
I cannot even imagine doing technique in a set of high heals, but it was fairly common for the books targeting technique for women to show them that way. I especially liked the Nakiyama book on self-defense for women, where they demonstrate technique fighting on stairs while wearing heals.
The book also shows using a table as a makeshift Makiwara – though now that I think of it I am not sure a horizontal striking surface does not have a different name. I never use one.
While I love finding gems like this, and love the insight they give on the state of Karate looking back into the past, it is bitter sweet. A book as awesome as this one, it is awesome in part because it is unlikely to end up making the jump to being digitized. So who knows if it will be available for martial historians even 50 years from now?
Something stuck me at the dojo tonight. The true irony of Karate is found in that moment when the Makiwara makes you so frustrated with your punching that you want to hit it. I swear that thing is mocking me.
I’m in the process of prototyping several IoT devices as part of evaluating a startup idea, and since the devices are going to go in people’s homes design matters – even for initial units for evaluating the idea. Actually, I think design is especially important for evaluation units because I am trying to find out if people want to bring technology like this into their homes.
One of the things that make me love 3D printers is that they make the black project boxes a thing of the past. Once I finished prototyping the electronics, firmware, and cloud side code – I was able to sketch up a few case designs on paper. Then pick the one I liked the best for initial testing.
At this point I should probably point out that I am not an industrial designer. When I showed my design to the designer I want to work with on the project, he said it reminded him of one of those bubble gum tape dispensers from when we were kids. (Ouch!) Still, I think my design is a hell of an improvement over testing with black project boxes, and it’s a pretty decent match for the design I liked best of the 15 or so I sketched through. Here is what it looks like sitting on the windowsill in my reading room.
I have the design split across three boards. A sensor board inside the dome, the eps8266 board with sensor breakout, and a DC/DC converter to power everything off of a AAA battery. The boards I made at home are super ugly, and hacked on, but functional. Enough that I am ready to put in an order for an initial run of boards to build a dozen or so test units.
I’m building some proof of concept prototypes for a startup product around the ESP’s, and they proved quick and easy to iterate around. This stuff just used to be so much harder! It is awesome to have an 80MHz 16 bit micro-controller with built in WiFI for $3. The ESP-03’s I have been using are also nicely packaged into an easy to use breakout board.
This picture pretty much captures my route so far. I had just heard about Radio Shack’s being broken up when my ESPs arrived. So I used a Rat Shack breakout to test the core circuit, then iterated my design on some quick and dirty home cut PCB boards. Forgive the nasty look of the soldering, each of those boards has been hacked on a bunch as I iterated through different sensor circuits. The end result turned out to be a nice proof of concept prototype, enough for me to evaluate the startup idea. Well, enough that I could figure out I want to make a run of ~100 of these units and get them in the hands of others to do more evaluation.
You know that saying that single men are bears with furniture? Well, for me at least its true. You can ask my house plants which I am always forgetting to water. So I wanted a network connected soil moisture sensor to remind me about watering specific plants. The other sensors on the board are for a project I am evaluating with some friends as a startup idea. That circuit sits, mostly, on a separate daughter board not shown.
Here you can see the soil moisture sensor being tested.
So while I love the ESP’s, and intend to blog more about them – it is a bit of a love / hate relationship. I have a pile of blown boards. The first one I blew I chalked up to my being the cause, but after a few of them I’ve noticed that the chips in the batch I bought seem to be highly sensitive to reprogramming cycles. It looks like the number of read / write cycles on some of the chips internal flash might be as low as 10-15 cycles. Once I have some more time I intend to try thrash testing them to nail down failure parameters better.
This URL has a great roundup of all the current EPS breakout boards, with pictures for easy identification.