Initial Brew Rig Planning
Arighty, I said I would post this, but life got in the way. Heres the run down of my current plans.
Containers:
I'm going to have three 10 gallon stainless steel containers fabricated. These will serve as the sparg tank, the mash tun, and the boil kettle. I could really get away with two, but then I couldn't run two batches at once.
Fermenters will be 10 gallon glass carboys, or stainless tanks. I'm hoping I will be able to get some air tight stainless tanks, but as far as cost and speed I can buy the glass carboys locally minus the cost of materials, fabrication, and design time.
Chiller will be a stainless tank holding approximately 12 gallons capacity to compensate for copper cooling plumbing and a pelter cooler.
All inter-container plumbing will use copper pipe.
Heating:
I will heating the sparg tank, mash tun, and boil kettle using propane heat. I'm planning on using a 21 or 32 tip propane heating element beneath each unit. Propane makes things simple as I won't need to run a natural gas line because I can reuse propane canisters from the grill.
Controls:
Right now I'm planning on using an Allen-Bradley SLC-500 PLC for all the grunt work. The SLC-500 is an industrial grade programmable logic controller. Allen-Bradley says they had 1.6 million of these little dandies installed worldwide, but they are now considered obsolete. Obsolete is relative. You can pick these units up for a song on ebay and they have more than enough capability to control my approximately 40 I/O points.
For controlling my SLC-500 I'm going to write some nifty code for an Arduino. The Arduino is going to provide a 'supervisor' mode to the SLC-500. Basically I want to abstract an web-based interface on top of the SLC-500 that can be used to program recipes and monitor the rig.
Display on a Contact Lens
The IEEE has an article about the current state of embedding displays on contact lenses.
We’ve fabricated prototype lenses with an LED, a small radio chip, and an antenna, and we’ve transmitted energy to the lens wirelessly, lighting the LED. To demonstrate that the lenses can be safe, we encapsulated them in a biocompatible polymer and successfully tested them in trials with live rabbits.
This is looking good so far if they've already started testing prototypes on animals. I wonder how one would go about signing up for human trials?
Sweet DIY electric motorcycle
From the article:
With only a semester to burn on the project, Miceli got straight to designing. He hashed out the details with brainstorming, sketches and CAD models, taking cues from some of his favorite bikes, including the radical KTM RC8. [The bike] carries two dozen 40Ah lithium iron phosphate batteries. Miceli figures the pack has a total output about 3 kilowatt-hours. The juice powers a 6.75-inch AC motor rated at 43 horsepower and 95 foot-pounds of torque. The pack recharges in six hours from a standard 110-volt outlet. Miceli estimates the range at about 60 miles and has hit a top speed of about 70 mph.
AMD preping new multi-monitor technology
AMD is developing a new technology/feature for release. If your a fan of multi-monitor setups your going to love this. Using next-gen GPU's and the DisplayPort specification, a single GPU will drive many displays. Now your thinking that this isn't that impressive, I can do that with my video card now! What is impressive is that it can currently drive up to six displays with resolutions in the 2560x1600 range. AMD is demoing the setup using 6, 30" monitors pushing 2560x1600. Now I just need to buy a bunch of monitors with DisplayPort.
Pics at The Tech Report: Eyefinity pushes over 24 million pixels with one next-gen Radeon.