Hold on tight 2012.

Back again after a long absence and this time around I’m going to dedicate more time to my blog. So, 2012 has finally arrived and this is going to be a phenomenal year for change and achieving goals; throw in a paradigm shift or two.

 

Wishing everyone and their families all the very best for the year ahead. May your dreams be realised this year.

Getting on with the changes, today I decided to have my hair cut short, buzz-cut short. With the weather being so hot and humid (31 degrees Celsius), the short hair is great. Also decided to kickstart 2012 with a project and I intend doing a whole bunch of projects this year – mostly to do with photography. In 2011, I discovered the Arduino; an open-source electronic prototyping programmable computer board which is going to feature in many of the projects tackled during 2012. The first project will however not include the Arduino.

The 2012 buzz-cut look

Project 2012-1: Suspended animation in liquid.

 

This project consists of some breadboard prototyping and a kit amplifier driving a 60 Watt speaker. The breadboard circuit is a function generator capable of generating a tone ranging from a low frequency to a high frequency, adjustable via the potentiometer labelled “Freq”. I do not know the exact frequency range as I do not have an oscilloscope (If anyone has an iPhone-based Imso or Oscium oscilloscope which they no longer need, I’ll gladly accept gifts, lol) The “Power” potentiometer adjusts the output power from 0.9 VDC  to 3.6 VDC. The “kit” amplifier copes well with the output power adjusted down to the minimum.

Both the circuits described above are driven from a 12 VDC lead acid battery and the speaker is flush-mounted in an enclosure. The speaker points upwards and the top surface is covered with a stretched sheet of silicon rubber or latex – currently testing large balloons and thera-band sheets.

 

This sheet is where the magic is going to occur. The frequency oscillations will cause the rubber/latex sheet to vibrate and the liquid placed on the sheets directly above the speaker driver will be elevated by the generated tone and at a given point, high-speed photographs will be taken of the liquid in suspended animation. Basic tests completed and all is functioning as expected, but I cannot take any shots tonight as the low-frequency resonance may cause an upheaval within our household, let alone the neighbourhood.

 

The project will eventually make it onto a PCB as the breadboard is hardly the format for a functional device. Hopefully I can squeeze all the circuitry into the same plastic hosting as the potentiometers. Who said 2012 wasn’t going to present challenges right from day one?

 

Pictures to follow tomorrow.

 

Cheers for now, Chas.