Bubble tube lamps - explanation and construction

I've always liked these bubble tube lamps that used to be built into Christmas tree ornaments, and were also featured in classic jukeboxes. I decided to make one in my own shop and here I explain how they work and how I built one.

Blow molding plastic water bottles

This video is a response to Grant Thompson's water bottle challenge. Check out Grant Thompson "The King of Random"
http://www.thekingofrandom.com

You don't need much special equipment to blow mold plastic bottles in a home shop. If I had more time, I would have made a custom wooden form on the lathe, then made a two-part plastic mold around it, and blow molded the bottle into the plaster mold.

Cookie perfection machine - butter dispenser

I am building a machine that will dispense and mix ingredients to make a single cookie. The benefit is that each cookie on the sheet can have its own recipe, and the baker can sample all of the cookies to better understand how ingredient variations will affect taste and texture. In this video, I talk about the butter dispenser.

The folks at Meta Mate gave me the idea for customer-rating via QR code.
http://www.metamate.cc/

Hacking a milligram balance (scale) with a Parallax Propeller microcontroller

For an upcoming project, I'd like to develop a dispensing system that can measure out a desired mass of material. The idea would be to use a microcontroller, dispensing valve, and electronic balance to provide feedback. I already have an American Weigh Scales miniPro-100, and decided to hack it so that my microcontroller can discover how much mass is on the balance. It can then regulate the dispensing valve appropriately.

The balance contains a Cirrus CS5530 24-bit ADC. I tapped the clock and data lines and found bursts of data that occurred at 7.5Hz. The clock is about 150KHz. I used a Parallax Propeller running assembly in one of its cores to capture the data stream and load it into my main program.

Cleaning a high-vacuum Penning gauge (cold cathode vacuum gauge)

My high-vacuum Penning gauge has been having some problems lately. The last time that I "fixed" it, I used lead solder to create a crushable metal seal between the parts of the gauge body. Eventually the rosin leaked out and probably caused contamination within the gauge.

I bought some Indium wire on eBay to replace the metal seals after cleaning the gauge with a bead blaster, sandpaper on glass, and lots of alcohol swabs.

Proper explanation of Penning Gauges:
http://www.thinksrs.com/downloads/PDFs/ApplicationNotes/IG1hotapp.pdf