Videos of Turbine in Action

This is trial 1. As you can see I got off to a rough start.

This is trial 4 - you can see why I'm having trouble getting a good solid start.



This is trial 8 - the best trial to date. I will need to continue refining the pressure mechanism to get better results from the turbine.



So, what's happening here? Will this is running on the boundary layer effect. Basically, the molecules of a gas or liquid will rush into the chamber. Once they hit a disk on the runner part of the molecules surface will latch onto the surface of the disk and pull it with it. As this continues to happen energy is lost and the particle/ molecule will spiral in towards the center (where the exhaust valve is). This action drags the disk along with the particles and the disks are set into motion. This is what drives the runner and why no buckets or blades are needed.

If run in reverse ( say you use energy to turn the runner) and pump in the gas or liquid in through the exhaust valve - you are now running it as a compressor/ pump. In some models the turbine is strong enough to pump mud with rocks. As a matter of fact a few oil companies have been using these as pumps since the 60's. It's a great way to pump up oil with rocks and sludge!

TESLA TURBINE!

So, as some of you may remember, around spring of last year I had a failed attempt at building a Tesla Turbine. Obviously the problem was aiming too high for a proto-type (using aluminum disks 1 ft in diameter).
This time I took a page out of the instructables book at this page. Mr. Fixits over at instructables has come up with a really clever way to build a Tesla Turbine. I became so enamored with this build so much that I decided to build my own proto-type turbine almost identically. This would allow me to test the claim on the page and at the same time investigate my own doubts about a blade-less turbine.
By the way, I know this is interrupting the FTIR table but I have to do something while the parts get shipped!

This is a side view of the turbine. Basically just cd's I don't want in the cd case they came in. Also, there are some plastic washers in there I used as spacers.

I drilled a few holes with my dremel ( not sure the of diameter) to act as an exhaust port. The holes don't span the entire height - that's actually about the extent of it. This might be a problem as I'm not properly exhausting the water or air.


This is a view from the side - just a regular cd case. If you look closely you'll see the tope 2 cd's are at an angle - this is probably due to the nozzel. I wasn't able to mount it perfectly - this creates drag which drops the RPM's. I haven't yet gotten a tachymeter (I only did this today around 11 am) so I can't tell how many RPM's I might be losing.







This is the first nozzel mechanism. I used 2 nozzels. This connects directly to the faucet. I can use the control valve to vary the pressure feed into the turbine.







This is the full assembly. The little red thing would be the second nozzel. I hot glued that into the case ( which is where the friction comes in).



        

Infra Red Web Cam 1st test

In a future post I will show how to take apart the Creative Web Cam Instant. Incidentally, creative is currently selling these for $7.99 US click here or here to see what I'm talking about. The second of the two I believe has better resolution.
So, what I'm showing here is the difference in the thickness of the visible light filter versus the clarity you get. Please note, I messed up the lens taking it out the first time. So if you do this, please have a file handy and file the lens out of its holder.
This First image is the camera using 1 square of unexposed film negative. This is the best I can get the camera - so now you can see why you should take better care extracting your lens.


The second shot down is me using 2 squares of unexposed film negative. You can see it's gotten blurrier. I believe part of the reason for this is because it takes time for the squares to settle on to each other. I did this in succession to get the shots as fast as I could. So, basically the negatives don't sit well, and the air between them acts to refract and reflect the light a bit causing this distortion when it finally hits the ccd chip. Also, remember the lens is messed up!

O.K. so in this shot I'm using 3 slivers of film negative. I've tried to keep my face at the same angle so the comparison is easier. All these shots were taken at the same time of day and in the same amount of light. So, ceteris paribus the only variable here is the thickness of the filter.

I guess even the reason that 1 sliver works better than 3 is that 1 sliver is actually closer in thickness to the filter that originally came with the camera. Thanks to codongolevat www.instructables.com for suggesting this idea. There are tons of great ideas and comments @ instructables - so please check this site out when you have the time. No one I have shown it to has regretted it yet! Also, there are people who have already successfully built, tested, set up, and filmed their touch tables working.

I said the next post would be about disassembling the camera but I might forget. I will try to do my best though.

Mac Book Pro Web Cam

This might be trivial but I thought I would post it anyhow. The webcam that comes standard with the Mac Book Pro is capable of picking up Infra Red LED's.
I'm posting a few pictures here of the remote control that came with my MBP as proof.

Smoke Demo Take 2

This is Juan and me trying to figure out why Smoke is crashing.

Smoke Demo

This is Juan and I working out the smoke demo.

Software Testing

O.K.
So, my friend Juan and I decided to test the touch lib software on my MBP. I had to boot into XP b/c I couldn't exactly figure out how to setup the software and binaries in Leopard.We set up the modified infra red cam to view the lcd and then ran the software. Since the software detects IR blobs we decided to use a loose IR LED. We also used a remote control ( which caused some problems as I'll explain later) because we thought we had blown the led since we just connected it to a battery without a resistor. So, below I have posted some video of the test run. We successfully ran the software and turned the LCD screen into a "touch screen". We were able to maintain some level of interaction with the computer via the software. The software crashed repeatedly and I'm assuming that's because we used the LED from a remote control. Since remote controls tell the IR LED's to beep a sort of binary morse code (light off =0, light on =1) we tried to use a button that had the least morse code. So we did set the IR points with the remote and therefore ran into a few problems. When we ran the setup the rectangles would be irregular and choppy. Also, when we ran the smoke demo the demo crashed. Most likely the morse code overloaded the software recognition and crashed it. We tried using the IRLED and had slightly better results, but at the end of the day we don't have the wave guide (acrylic) and thus don't really have the physics backing us to make it smooth yet. However, we don't think it was bad for a ghetto rigged run!

Multi Touch Interface through Frustrated Total Internal Reflection

This is my first article. I've recently found out about Jeff Hans paper "Han, J. Y. 2005.'Low-Cost Multi-Touch Sensing through Frustrated Total Internal Reflection. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology' ".

So what I'm trying to do is follow in the footsteps of the few that have already built their mock-ups and posted them up on www.instructables.com.

 I'll be guiding off of Han's paper and the instructable guides and posting the results here.

So far I've modded my old Creative pro web cam so that it now detects infrared light. I am currently trying to get a projector and deciding what bandwidth IR LED's to purchase.