I’ve been wanting to try experimenting with slow sand filtration of water for some time now. A quick Google search on “slow sand filter” yields interesting pages from the CDC, the WHO, Wikipedia, and a site with a wealth of information on the subject at biosandfilter.org and slowsandfilter.org They all agree that slow sand filtration is…
Pond skimmer
Pond skimmers are devices that suck water in from the surface of the pond and run it through a net or mesh of some sort to trap debris and eject the water somewhere else (possibly passing it through a more serious filter first). I asked our workers to put one together using most of the…
Prototype air pump
The 220V AC air pump we bought for about $60 a while back from an aquarium supply shop was horribly inefficient. From basic physics, power is equal to force times speed. For an air pump pumping air into water, you can calculate the force as the difference between air pressure at the pump, and water…
Mystery print: 3D printed boat thruster gearbox
I’ve spent the last week printing and assembling a prototype gearbox made from PLA. If you were curious at all about my mystery print from last weekend, you can see it inside of the gearbox here: The entire gearbox is made up of about 18 different printed pieces totaling about half a kilogram in weight….
Designing a crazy floating house
I’ve been pondering the idea of making our house a floating house. We have a big pond. A floating house doesn’t need pilings. And I have this crazy idea that the house could be made disconnected in the sense of an autonomous propeller driven vehicle. So it could rotate to track or avoid the sun….
Biofuels from algae?
I’ve always been interested in biofuels. Cooking gas, cooking oil, diesel fuel made entirely from your own land. Sounds pretty cool. There are lots of DIY biogas projects on the net. I’m curious to try this after we move onto the land, particularly if we ever get larger animals like goats. I’ve also done some…
Prototype axial flow water circulation pump
Here are some pictures of a work-in-progress prototype for a simple axial flow water circulation pump: After my test of the “pump payanak”, I kept thinking about the fact that it is pumping the water up 1.5m, making the water do a 90 degree turn and then dropping the water back into the pond. I…
Solar Power Test
We’ve been experimenting with solar power for a few years measuring the differences between cloudy days and sunny days and comparing how much energy we actually get from a solar panel per day vs its rated maximum power. Manufacturers have an incentive to overestimate these numbers, so real world testing is always best. As it…
New Project: Land Development
It has actually been a little more than a year since we bought a 4 rai piece of land just outside Bangkok, Thailand. (4 rai = about 1.6 acres) But since I just started this blog, I’m picking up this project in the middle. How to begin? Let me describe the scenario… Praew and I…
New Project: SlingBot
I just started a new robot project. The goal is to build a 3D printed robot that can mount an IP camera, has pan and tilt functionality, and a drive motor that drives the robot along a sling cable. It will probably be battery powered with an inductive charging connection. Ideally, I can control it…
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