[hackerspaces] May Hackathon

General
1

The May Synchronous Hackathon will take place over the weekend of the
21st and 22nd of May. For this months challenge we are asking spaces to
experiment with Non-Newtonian Fluids.

http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Synchronous_Hackathon/2011-05-21

Robert

2

Dave,

I'd like to be involved in this. I can probably have some sort of
experimental setup ready by the end of May.

Thanks,
Rob

3

Does anyone remember the exact setup we used last time? Did we use the oscilliscope as a waveform generator? And then I think we passed that through one amp or another into the car stereo speaker. Everything should still be there at the Hive somewhere. Probably even the cornstarch.

Note that to participate in the Synchronous Hackathon, you’d want to be active on the weekend of the 21st and 22nd.

~Dave

4

Other than the god-awful mess we made, everything is still at the hive.

  • cornstarch - on the shelf above the kitchen bar
  • cornmeal (don’t use this)
  • big speaker driver - shelves in 3C?
  • amp and driver for the butt shaker or whatever it’s called - 3C?
  • 55 gallon drum and pipe fittings - 3C

We used a software tone generator on a laptop to create the signal to drive the speaker. I believe it ended up with a paper plate suspended by masking tape over the speaker, but it quickly saturates the paper plate and the sound waves can tear it up, dumping ooblek into the speaker cone. Further development in necessary.

The other idea that we did not pursue very far was bolting the butt shaker to the 55 gallon drum using the pipe fittings and finding a resonant frequency for the drum - put ooblek on top and fun ensues. We did try this and got some results, but it seemed like we needed a whole bunch more fluid mixed up. Could next try using some clay to build a smaller area on top of the drum to make it deeper.