Over at Instructables, you can find out how to make just about anything. I've been collecting a list of interesting food-related projects. This one is: Make pizza with a plasma cutter, a backhoe and a pile of mud!

One of the great things about this particular Instructable is how the author, Fritz Bogott, talks about many of the inspirations and deviations that he took while on the path. There is some good use of reclaimed materials, some techniques sustainable and not, and a whole bunch of pictures.

To view the detail shots of the photos, you'll need to make an account and sign in. I don't know that I can convince Melanie to let me go ahead and try to make this one, but it seems like a great way to enhance the back yard.

Some of you may know that, during the day, I build robots. And while making a car that can drive itself on city streets is pretty cool, I have to admit that I kind of wish I had my own mobile drink serving/mixing robot. But, with the aid of Instructables, I can now build my own BaR2D2.*

The build instructions are very complete. It wanders around a party, it has lots of clever, sound-activated lights, it serves drinks, it has cold beverage and ice storage. Oh, just watch the video:



Via BoingBoing Gadgets.

Preview photo by Kristie Stephens.

*- And, of course, you can also build your own. They don't all necessarily have to go to me.

EcoRenovator has a post on how to make a fridge that runs on 100Wh of energy per day. It's links to a PDF by Tom Chalko* that basically shows you how to modify a chest freezer to operate in temperature ranges.

The nice thing about the fridge is that, when you open the door, the cold air doesn't readily escape, and thus you save energy. The bad things are: you lose a lot of volume of storage, because for the floor space, the fridge is taller than a chest freezer; also, it's a pain to organize and retrieve things from a chest freezer setup, so the ergonomics aren't there.

Still, if your overriding concern is to be good to the environment and to use less energy, this is clearly a relatively easy and effective way to go.

via Make.

*- Boy, is this an interesting side note. Apparently, Dr. Chalko is very keen on the environment, which you will notice from his web site. Also, doing a minimal amount of digging on Google reveals that there is a paper he's written linking an increase in seismic activity to global warming. Apparently, there is no such correlation, but there was quite the kerfuffle about it. All this does not mean that the refrigerator idea is not a sound one.

Thinking back to the old Kitchen Computer idea of yore, one of the important aspects of it is being able to monitor, in depth, the temperature of, well, everything in the chain of the food. So, obviously the food itself should be monitored, the cooking environment, the cooling environment, and the resting environment. This will not only let us know whether the food is done, but how quickly, what path it takes, whether it should be safe to eat or not, and if cooling it down made everything in the fridge go bad.

I've explored the topic of temperature control in the past, but I had never found quite the right sensors to use. I've been playing around with the other aspects of the computer interface, such as the microprocessor and the communications, but the temperature sensors were never quite right for me.

Fortunately, I am not the only geek in the world, and someone else has done much of the legwork (and, really, all of the work) for tracking these temperatures. Enter the Turkey Tracker, which was live-casting temperature updates for a turkey, the smoker, and the outside environment. There was even a video stream, photos, and everything. This is a project by, according to the list of authors on the blog, Robin Parker, Michael Weinberg, and Chris Chen.

The Turkey Tracker Blog has plenty of words describing what's went into the process. What Went Into the Turkey Tracker describes some of the hardware and software, including the ideal, high-temperature thermometers that I'll need to use for my setup (though I may have to have separate probes for low-temperature sensing). There's even a FAQ, that gives answers on cooking and temperature sensing techniques. To see what it all looks like, you can check out this Flickr set about Project Wirebird.*

Obviously, I'll be learning much from this example, so that I can build a strong and powerful kitchen computer. There is talk of open-sourcing the code as well as having multiple turkey-trackers next year, so perhaps I'll get in on the fun then.

via Make.

*- The image I used for the preview of this article was taken from that Flickr Set, and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution, Share-Alike License. So, as with my stuff, feel free to use that image or its source, but be sure to give attribution. Also, if you use that image, be sure to license whatever you use it in similarly.