Sunday, September 30, 2012
A few weeks ago, I came up with an idea for a new Arduino project. The concept is and execution should be pretty simple: Hook up an accelerometer with some LEDs using an Arduino board. Stick this little gadget in a toy car and use the accelerometer to measure the speed that the car is traveling. Based on the speed, the LEDs will light up different colors along a gradient… Continue reading
Sunday, September 30, 2012
My roommate has been in Africa for the past few weeks, so I took the opportunity to blow up the kitchen several times while she was gone.
First, a saison/farmhouse-style beer that didn’t go exactly as planned (low mash efficiency) but tastes delicious anyway.
Second, a remake of the delicious ginger-spiced pale ale
I woke up this morning, rather late after a long night in the lab, and decided I wanted to make a beer today. As I sat in front of my computer, drinking some coffee and contemplating all of the delicious possibilities, I thought, “Ah! Coffee… Something I haven’t used in a beer for a long while. How could I incorporate coffee or coffee flavors into a beer, but do something… Continue reading
My friend and assistant brewmaster Nate and I put together a beer to be drunk during the week before the Gebheim-Thiel wedding this August. Paul simply requested something refreshing and relatively low in alcohol for the summer. So, in honor of the Gebheim name, we used a combination of American and German ingredients to make a clean, crisp wheat beer featuring sweet honey, spicy rye, and earthy, herbal, and minty… Continue reading
After my previous cheesemaking attempt with Paul, which was successful for a first try but pretty obviously not quite right, I decided to make another last weekend. Since I was using pasteurized milk, this time I used CaCl2, which helped the the milk gel better and gave a clean break. I made a small batch to test things out and it turned out nicely. Here’s the recipe I… Continue reading
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Here it is! I finally got a chance to put it together. Check out the post for a video and more details. Continue reading
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I’ve been making cheese for a few months now, but just soft cheese like ricotta and cottage cheese. I wanted to try making a hard cheese, something that I could age for a while. Making a hard cheese requires pressing it — which you can rig up with supplies from around the house. But since I think this is something that I’d like to do on a regular basis, I decided that I’d make a cheese press. I’m not much of a builder of wooden objects, so it took my friend Paul telling me he also wanted to make cheese to do it.… Continue reading
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Picture, Fritzing schematic, and Arduino C code uploaded here
I spent Sunday evening hacking together this prototype of the circuit that will run in the stuffed animal I talked about in my previous post. (Or perhaps some kind of birthday eCard, which might be a little easier. My sewing skills are even more amateurish than my electronics & programming abilities.)
Follow the link for a video of it in action. Continue reading
My niece’s second birthday is coming up and I wanted to try to make something interesting for her. Over the past year or so, I’ve been playing with an Arduino kit I bought from Adafruit Industries but haven’t really made anything unique yet. After seeing this cool little kit for sale at Sparkfun Electronics, I thought, why not try to expand on that idea, add a LilyPad Arduino and a speaker to the project, and modify a stuffed animal to make it do something?… Continue reading
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