Well no more! Enter the humble Triac. They’re tiny, cheap, and in my slow switching applications the circuitry isn’t too complicated. That being said, it’s still the most complicated circuit I’ve ever attempted.

I figured a good first application would be a switched outlet. It’s fairly simple, and it’s something that I could use in prototyping later on.

And there you have it. A neat little package with two independently controlled power plugs. The best part is the cost. The whole thing cost less then $10! With SSRs it would have been ~$80, and I don’t know if they even would have fit in the box.

Triac Box from br3ttb on Vimeo.

There’s one issue I’m going to need to keep an eye on. Apparently, if a Triac overheats, it tends to fail into the on position. There’s nothing here that detects if this is about to happen, so I’ll have to keep an eye on it for a while to be sure there’s adequate cooling

Update: There is NOT adequate cooling. I did a real test just now. 1500W toaster oven on high. after a minute I started smelling perfboard. Everything was disconnected before any damage was done, but some design revisions are in order before I try to switch high loads again.

So the guys over at ARM took the arduino pid library and ported it for use with their mbed platform.  Nice little stroke to the ego there.  That’s not the main reason I’m excited though.   Because they’re a legit company,  they have written documentation.

I’m terrible at documentation.  Commenting my code is hard enough.  Writing clear, concise, well-thought-out help files?  I’m as useless as 1000 drunk monkeys with typewriters.

It’s always been nagging at me that the Arduino PID Library didn’t have a clear help document. Now, indirectly, it does. Since the backend is the same, everything they say about the mbed library works with the Arduino library as well.

It’s terrifying.  I’m still in shock that it actually works, but it totally does. One dollar of materials and two or three hours of work, and I now have a safety razor of my very own.

Why? Why would you do something like this?

Basically, I’m cheap and I like making things for myself. I’d been toying with the idea off-and-on since reading a Lifehacker post on safety razors. It all came together for me this past week.

Eureka!

I was looking at an image from an old razor patent when inspiration struck. Based on the known razor width and some trigonometry, I was able to determine that the two main radii were 0.53″ and 0.66″. It turns out that these are almost identical to 3/4″ and 1″ sch40 pvc, which is available everywhere.

Construction

Sorry. No mid-build pictures on this project. I never thought it would work. This was supposed to be a study of sorts, just seeing how things might work in further iterations. Instead it worked, and I’m stuck trying to give the gist of it…

1. Cut a piece of 3/4″ pvc slightly bigger than the desired top piece.
2. Wrap sandpaper around some 1″ pvc and sand down the botton edge of the 3/4″.
3. Cut a section of 1″ pvc for the bottom piece.
4. Make holes in the top and bottom pieces.
5. Run a bead of jbweld down the center of the top piece.  as it hardens shape it into a ridge.
6. After the jb hardens, sand such that it just fits the blade’s slot.
7. Remove material from the bottom piece to make room for the jb ridge.
8. In theory, you’re done!  In reality there’s some fine-tuning to do.  It took me about an hour of trial-and-error sanding until I was happy with the final shape of the top piece.

I’m going to shave with this for awhile, and when I make the next one I’ll try to be more diligent about documentation.

Insane. I’ve been toying with the idea of making a grist mill using burr plates. The main hurdle for me was visualizing all the different angles and how they would interact. I tried drawing one in SketchUp, but after many hours, I threw in the towel. Before OpenSCAD came along I was trying to build the mental momentum to draw the plate in Processing! Seriously. I was going to use their 3D libraries and a TON of math so I could play with a parametrized model.

Speaking of coding, I should also mention that the code to generate the model is TINY. I’ve spread it out and commented it here, but in rough-and-dirty form, the code is less than 10 lines. 10 LINES! I’m free to edit any of the parameters, re-render, and a new model pops right up. Great stuff.

So I’d say there’s a new tool in the tool-box. It’s by no means the only one I’ll use, but certain modeling tasks just got a heck of a lot easier.

I pulled apart the drawing panel. It looks like it’s made up of two sheets of plastic. One is embossed with a honeycomb, and the other is then fused over-top. I really had to yank to get these apart, so I’m guessing they used some heat to melt them together.

Inside there’s metal shavings and a PUTRID smelling liquid. You know how cherry, watermelon, orange, etc flavors don’t taste like the real thing? Imagine if the same people were asked to make something that smells like feet. That’s the best analogy I can think of: synthetic feet smell.

Oh man, if you could…

Now the million dollar question… could someone DIY one of these? Maybe using a clear plastic mesh and two thin sheets of the same plastic? I think the hardest part would be dealing with the liquid. It needs to be viscous enough to hold the shavings in place, it needs to be opaque, and the plastic layers need to be fused closed with the liquid in place.

If you could make one in the 3′ x 4′ range, the payoff would be huge. Even if you don’t do what I’m thinking with it, it would still make a kick-ass whiteboard replacement.

I went around and around in my head, trying to figure out how to overcome these issues, when my girlfriend says, “Why not use a Magna Doodle?” Why not indeed! The erasing process is just a swipe of a magnet, and there’s no aluminum dust to contend with. Much easier. (I should mention here that while I have always known this toy as “Magna Doodle,” that’s a discontinued name. Fisher Price bought it and renamed it “Doodle Pro.”)

There’s a wrinkle though. Unlike the Etch-A-Sketch, the Doodle Pro needs the pen to be on the viewer’s side of the screen. That would probably be ok, but ideally I’d like all the display hardware to be hidden from view. What to do, what to to?

Well, I got some cheap Doodle Pros today, and upon taking one apart, it looks like that may not be an issue. It turns out that when you draw something on one side, you get a decent negative on the other! So I’m going to try, at least at first, to create a display with the pen hidden from view. The user will see a black (gray, I guess) background with white lines. The lines are a little fatter than I’d like, but there may be some improvements that can be made to the pen that will fix that.

Constant Air + Constant Heat = Constant Smoke. Who knew?

Constant Air

Holes. There were tons of holes. To have complete control over the air I had to patch them all. Most of them were fairly easy. A little JBWeld and aluminum foil and I had rigid, (fairly) high temp patches. All the seams got a bead of JB for good measure as well.

The biggest hole of all was at the front, where the toaster door used to be. The box was essentially open. What I did there was rotate the entire box 90 degrees, making that opening the top. The ramp needed to be repositioned, but that wasn’t too hard. Now the gaping hole was on the exit side of the chamber, where leaks aren’t as important.

The cover for this hole was also upgraded. Where before it was covered using a big piece of foil, I finally used something better: a nice metal sheet with a 3″ outlet pipe.

Constant Heat

In the previous attempt I had scrapped the stock themostat and switched to SSR control of the heating elements. I set it to a fixed value, walked away, and the whole thing promptly caught on fire.

This time around, I added a thermistor to the mix. It’s amazing what a little feedback can do. As far the control algorithm, I didn’t bother using the PID library (*gasp*.) For a process this simple all it took was a back-of-the-envelope P-only controller. It held the temperature and SSR output constant, and more importantly, things didn’t catch fire.

Vibration

As before, I used a blow-drier fan for vibration. This time, however, it was mounted on the OUTSIDE of the box. It vibrated well -10 seconds every 15 minutes- for the duration of the test. It also didn’t melt into a pile of goo, which was a definite plus.

Results

I’m ecstatic.   All my success criteria have been met! The Smoke was consistent, and by restricting the air inlet I was able to adjust smoke density.

I put in a pound of wood (3 large chunks), and this thing ran for 5 hours straight before the smoke started to die down. There’s room for 3-4 Times as much wood in there, so an 8-16 hour run time is attainable.

Next Steps

As far as proving out the concept, I’m pretty much done. All that’s left for this phase of the project is to smoke some meat.

Beyond that I’d like to improve the design from a DIY standpoint; making it as easy to copy as possible.

2nd Attempt

There were two main issues with the first attempt. The smoke was intermittent, and I needed to manually shake the ramp. In the second attempt I tried to take care of both problems with one stroke.  I mounted a fan to the underside of the ramp. This would induce air circulation, and the spinning would vibrate the ramp. I settled on the fan out of a a hair-drier. The idea was appealing for several reasons:

• An old hair drier is $3 at the thrift store.
• A hair drier uses 120V AC.  I wouldn’t need a separate source to power it
• It’s a fan.

So I got the fan out and mounted it to the ramp.  It turns out that this idea wasn’t all that good.

1. Mounting the fan in the middle of the ramp like that did little to improve circulation.
2. The fan didn’t vibrate all that much
3. It turns out the motor was actually DC.  They use the heater coil as a resistor to get the voltage they need, then rectify it with a diode.  It’s a brilliant, low cost solution for them.  It was a pain in the butt for me.
4. The fan was LOUD.  You know, like a hair drier.

So other than learning how a hair drier is wiried, attempt 2 was pretty much a bust. I got the same smoke performance from a louder unit that needed a 12V power supply.

3rd Attempt

The fan didn’t really do much in the second attempt. It didn’t vibrate, and didn’t improve airflow. In the 3rd attempt I tried to fix both problems.

To increase the fan’s vibration, I decided to give it a little off-center weight. Inserting a screw into one of the blades shifted the center of gravity, and made it vibrate like a champ.  This didn’t do anything to help the noise / circulation issues though.  I try to be nice to my neighbors whenever I can, and 4-5 hours of vibrating hair drier noise just isn’t nice.

So I shifted gears. Instead of a constantly vibrating fan with on-off heat, I decided on an intermittent vibrating fan with more consistent heat. Since the initial smoke issues were caused by the On-Off heat control, maybe a more constant heat would lead to constant airflow / smoke. The Fan was relegated to vibration duty, turning on periodically to help the wood settle.

I built an arduino sheild (yes I used an offset header) to:

• Send a 25% output to an SSR controlling the heaters. 
• Vibrate the fan for 5sec every 10 min (more than enough to help the wood settle)

Great plan right?  I got everything set up, saw the smoke start, and walked away for 30 min.  Anyone know what happened next?  Anyone?  Yes.  You in the back.  The heaters added more and more heat to the chamber?  More than the air could remove,  even though the airflow was increasing with temperature?  You’re right!  I had suspected that this might happen, just not so quickly. 

…I came back to a fire.  It was contained within the box, and the box was alone on an a stone patio.  There wasn’t any danger, but the fan was cooked.  damn. Here’s some carnage photos where you can see the vibration screw:

So What Now?

I was hoping to be able to macgyver my way through this thing using aluminum foil and tape.  I’m going to have to up my game a bit.  In future attempts I’m going to start from overkill and work my way down, rather than the bottom up method I’ve been using.   So that means:

• Really sealing the chamber.
• Using an external fan
• Using dampers to control airflow in and out.
• Mounting the vibration mechanism OUTSIDE the fire box so it doesn’t get smoke/fire damage
• More precise temperature control.  That’s right.  PID control.  I said overkill.  I meant it.

Some serious progress has been made. We have smoke! It’s nowhere near done, but the results are encouraging. Here’s what’s been done since the last post.

Toaster Tear-down

The toaster I used cost me $10 at the thrift store. The first order of business was to take everything apart. 20 minutes with a screwdriver and some wire cutters, and I was left with the components I needed:

• A heat-resistant box
• 2 heating elements
• A thermostat
• An extra piece of sheet metal for the ramp (formerly the toaster’s outer shell)

All that stuff is in every toaster, and it’s all I really needed. This was a high-end model apparently, so there was a bunch of extra electronic components in there too. Lots of goodies for future projects. I won’t bother listing them all, but take a look at this picture. Not a bad haul for $10!

Heating Element Relocation

With everything apart, I could start construction. Per the design, the heating elements were relocated to the bottom corner of the chamber. I needed new holes, and as you can see from the picture, I did a terrible job. I should’ve used a sheet-metal drill. Instead I used tin-snips. Oh well. The holes are in the right place, and the heating elements fit.

Ramp Construction

The sheet metal that used to form the oven’s outer shell was cut and bent to form the wood-feed ramp. The inner walls of the box are contoured, so it took several tries to get something that fit nicely.

Thermostat Relocation

The last thing to do was move the thermostat. Since all the heat was going to be localized in a new place, I figured the thermostat should be nearer to it. I made a new hole in the center of the back, and mounted it there.

Time to Test!

Other than worrying about electrocution and burns, the testing phase was pretty straight forward:

• I put 3 pieces of apple wood on the ramp so they were touching the heater.

• Most of the holes in the hot boxwere then sealed with aluminum foil. I left holes for air intake and exhaust.

• After plugging it in, it took maybe 10 minutes to find the right thermostat setting. I slowly upped the temperature until there was a constant flow of smoke.
• Beyond that it was just sitting around and basking in the smokey aroma.

Results

Of course there’s lots of work still to be done, but I’m really happy with this first attempt.

The Positive:

• Those 3 pieces of applewood gave me 5 hours of smoke. I only had to intervene twice; shaking the box a little to get the wood to the heaters. Other than that it was continuous, automatic smoke!

Room for improvement:

• The smoke density wasn’t constant at all.  When the heaters were on there was a lot more smoke formation (Heat + increased convective airflow.) When they we off the smoke tapered off.
• Needing to manually shake the ramp violates one of the main design criteria I’m shooting for. This thing should “operate unattended.”
• Currently the thermostat is out in the open, making it susceptible to ambient temperature changes.
• It’s a little dangerous.  There’s exposed 120VAC all over the place.

Unlike most of the projects I’ve done in the past, this one is going to be a multi-poster. There’s just too many ins, too many outs. What’s the project? Turn a toaster oven into a high-quality barbecue smoke generator. Aaaaaand go!

First of All, Why Bother?

I’ll concede there’s a certain Zen-like satisfaction that comes from using only fire.  Constantly tending and tweaking,  making sure everything’s right.  I’ve done that, and with some success.  what I want now though, is consistency.  I want to start the process knowing there aren’t going to be any headaches.  I want automation.  It’s a travesty I know, but I’ve come to terms with that.

Design Criteria

Here’s what I’m going for. If I can get the smoker generator to do the following, I’ll consider the project a complete success. It should:

• Operate Unattended for 8-16 hours.
• Generate consistent smoke.
• Allow for adjustable smoke density
• Accept standard wood.  (No custom bricks, no sawdust, etc…)

Easy right?

The Plan

The design I’m going to try is pretty similar to what you’d see in a commercial smoker. The wood is on a ramp that leads to a heating element. A restricted amount of air is allowed to flow past the wood. Because there’s incomplete combustion, lots of smoke is generated. As wood is consumed, ash falls away and new wood takes its place. Gravity may be all I need for that to occur, but I’m guessing I’ll need to vibrate the ramp.

Stay Tuned…

It’ll be interesting to see how it goes. Subsequent posts will detail the construction process, as well as testing and any re-design. If it all fails in a huge ball of fire? Well that will be covered as well.