What is this?

This book is devoted to storing information on various topics I find interesting. These may turn into larger projects as I put more reaserch into them and create a more coherent whole.

A lot of the stuff here will be about self-sufficiency and manufacturing, with some programming things thrown in.

Biolab

This page details what is needed to construct, focused on open source solutions and cheaper DIY equipment, and safely operate a Biology lab.

This is filed under the Chemistry Lab because much of what is needed in a biolab is also needed in a chemistry lab. The main difference is Biolabs require a few extra pieces of equipment as well as very cold and stable storage.

Sources

Below are sources I've pulled from to create this page:

• Excedr.com biology lab equipment list: Good list of what equipment is needed in a lab. Biology specific equipment has a short description and list of popular brands. General lab equipment is just listed.
• Makezine's how to set up your own biolab: Article that looks at putting together a cheap home hobby lab for around $500. Goes into how to use and modify more commonly available stuff to work well enough.
• wbdg Notes on research lab building design: Not directly related to this spreadsheet, but looks into the consideration needed when building a laboratory research building. Has info on lab layout so may be tangentially useful.
• Fablabwgtn DIY Biolab: Covers a small groups experience in building and using their own biolab.

Construction

Building

Some considerations for the building/room the lab will be:

• Electricity as we need to run the equipment, but it needs to have fault tolerance since temperature fluctuations are very bad for stored specimens. At the very least, the fridges should have some form of backup power if there is power loss.

• Ventilation. Same as a chemistry lab, good ventilation is needed to remove fumes from chemicals.

  • Fume Hood Area for even better ventilation in a small work area.

• Water.

Equipment

General Equipment

Biolab Specific Equipment

Glassware

Note you will also need reagents which will be covered in the operations section of this page.

Operations

Common Needed Reagents

TODO

Electronics Fab

Integrated Chip Fab

DIY chips at home

Sam Zeloof built a home fab that was able to make a 6 transistor amp chip. More recently he managed to make 1000+ transistors on a single chip though has not made it into a functional chip, he is just working on improving processes to get transistor count and success rate up.

His work will make a good base for devleloping tools to make this kind of thing easier.

OpenFlexture

Website

Open source project for building high precision mechanical positioning specifically for use in microscopes and micromanipulators. By using 3D printer, the flexible plastic platform can be made cheaply. Overall the project allows produceing a cheap, high precition microscope. It can be used with normal lenses, or configured as a digital microscope with a bit more parts.

Stirling Engine

The main positive aspects of a Stirling Engine:

• Is an External Heat Engine. In other words, it functions by having a heat differential applied to it's hot and cold ends from outside the engine itself.
• Is Fuel Source Flexible. So long as the "fuel" can produce heat (or cold!), it can be used. You can also use multiple sources as needed so it is not impossible to use heat from solar concentrates during the day and burn gas or wood during the night and on cloudy days.
• Is Reversible, meaning you can do both of these:
  • Put in a temperature difference to generate mechanical motion.
  • Put in mechanical motion to generate a temperature difference.
• Is Quiet compared to other engines.
• Is Safe as it doesn't need to contain any high pressures like steam and internal combustion engines.

Some negative aspects of Stirling Engines:

• They require an initial mechanical push to get started if at a stand still.
• They need to be sealed air tight. And air is not the preferred internal working gas, though air is still plenty functional. However, gases with a lower specific heat is better.

Design

Engine Cycle

1. Isothermal compression within the cold end as heat is expelled from the system.
2. Constant-volume heat addition.
3. Isothermal expansion within the hot end as heat is added to the system.
4. Constant-volume heat rejection.

Working Fluid Gas Properties

The working fluid, that which is seal inside the engine, effects efficiency of the engine.

Temperature Difference and Efficency

Some Links

DIY projects:

• Older 3D printed design. Has link rot so kinda hard to actualy build.
• Newer 3D printed design
• Plans for stirling engines built from aluminum cans

Stirling Engine Research:

• Free PDF book on stirling engines
• Research paper on how stirling engines work (focus on thermal acoustics)
• Efficiency of Stirling engines using solar heating
• Stirling Engines for electrical generation

Wood Gas

Wood Gas is composed of H2 and Carbon Monoxide. Both of these gases are flammable hence its' usability as fuel. It can be produced from wood, as the name implies. A "Gasifier", the device that makes Wood Gas, heats wood in an near airless environment. The wood goes through pyrolysis which creates tars(in the gas phase) and wood gas.

Down Draft Stratified Wood Gasifier

Terms

• Stratified: Its called stratified because of the different layers of wood in different states of decomposition.
• Down Draft: The gasifier uses a down draft that originates at the wood hopper opening. This downdraft flows through the inactive wood layer down to the pyrolysis layer where it feeds the heat reaction, but isn't enough to actually burn the wood. As the air enter the pyrolysis layer it pushes the newly released wood gas and tars down the fire tube, through the ash chamber and filter unit, and into the engine/storage unit.

Components

• Wood hopper: metal cylinder (I used a galvanized trash can) holds inactive wood, wood going through pyrolysis, and ash and charcoal which falls down the fire tube.
• Fire Tube: A metal cylinder(mine is about 6 inch in diameter) attached to a flat metal circle. Needs to be slightly smaller then the hopper so it can fit just inside the mouth. The fire tube connection to the hopper must be air tight(it would be best to Braze it).
• Ash Chamber: Metal cylinder about the same size as the hopper. Ash and charcoal dust falls through the grate into this component, and they must be removed on a regular basis. The wood hopper(with fire-tube) is brazed to the ash chamber to make it air tight. A hatch needs to be added to allow for ash/charcoal dust removal. The gas flows from the fire-tube through the ash chamber and on to the filter unit.
• Filter Unit: 5 gallon metal bucket filled with wood chips. The filter unit catches ash and charcoal dust that is light enough to flow with the wood gas.

Thermocouple

Thermocouples are generally used as a way to measure tempature, rather then generate energy. A Thermocouple is made by joining two different kinds of metals side by side (not alloying them togeather). Heating these two metals will cause electricity to be generated. How much varies based on what two metals are being joined. However, basically all combinations we have tried have been very low output, in the microvolt range. This makes it good for sensors but bad for energy generation.

Thermocouples are used in some applications to provide energy. For example space probes and some rovers use them in conjunction with a radioactive material as there is no real moving parts that need maintenance making the setup lighter and longer lasting then other options.

Magnesium Antimony

Robert Murray's "1624 Thermoelectric Generators Have Just Made A Huge Leap Forward"

The above video looks a bit at a Magnesium-alloy and Copper Thermocouple. It aparently works a good bit better then a lot of the other pairings we commonly use. And his used of Magnesium is based on a paper where they used a Magnesium antimony alloy which works even better then his quick expariment.

possibly related pattent; NASA paper direct PDF link

Iron Powder based Power

Robert Murray-Smith Video

Video covers an interesting idea to burn iron powder to produce energy. As many know powder burns quite well, so well that there is a major danger for wood working workshops that produce lots of sawdust which can cause a fireball. Pure iron is quite reactive and will burn well releasing energy. Burning iron produces rust which can be easily captured recycled

Benefits

• No harmful off gasses: There are no side products other then rust (Fe2O3), so ventalation isn't a major issue like with other fuels that can produce toxic gases like carbon monoxide.
• Stable: Iron is comparatively stable and easy to store, compared to other fuels. You basically just need to keep it dry and if you want pump a noble gas into the container to keep it from reacting.
• Recyclable: The product, rust, can be captured and recycled back into iron powder, making it a decent store of energy.
• Abundant and Cheap: Iron is abundant in the earth's crust, and we have a massive industry built around producing it already. This makes it fairly cheap.
• Tech needed Mostly Exists: We already have tech to move the dust around (think sand blasters) and collect the rust afterwards (cyclones). We mostly need an actual burner product to be engineered and a good method to recycle the rust.

Negatives

• Don't Breath It: If rust becomes airborne, which is quite possible with the burning process, and people breath it for a long time, they will contract welder's lung or siderosis, a form of pneumoconiosis.
  • Source "The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has set a limit of 5 mg of iron oxide dust or fumes per cubic meter of air or m^3. This limit is the maximum average concentration of ferric oxide in air that a worker can inhale without requiring protective equipment over the course of a workday."
  • (same Source as above) "While limited exposure to rust dust is not harmful in the long term, repeated exposure irritates the eyes, ears, nose and throat and can damage the lungs. Frequent and prolonged exposure to the dust from rusted metal can result in siderosis, a lung disease that leads to other complications like pneumonia or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease."
  • Basically you would want to make sure that the rust cannot go airborne because if the system is airtight it could get damaged and start leaking rust into the home.
  • It would also be good to check on how fast rust settles out of the air.
• Not Portable: You cannot really use it in a motor like gas can be used. It might be usable in a steam engine based vehicle. It's mostly good for heating like air and water for home use.

Recycling Rust

See research page on sourcing Iron. There is a bacteria called iron bacteria that leaches rust out of the ground. Iron can be extracted from the bacteria slurry.

Research TODO

• Check PPM that will harm a mouse and or human adult/child.
• Check how fast rust settles out of the air.
• Check how much rust would be thrown up into the air from burning iron powder.
• Check how easy it would be to make the system undergo a dust explosion.
• How bad is iron powder to breath?
• How hard would it be to keep the system enclosed and functioning to prevent both rust and iron powder from going airborne.
• See if iron could be "burned" without a flame, just producing heat.
• Look up more info on the old steam engine cars that uses a boiler "pipe" which were super safe against boiler explostions.

DIY Polyimide Supercaps (Laser induced Graphene)

YT Video; Source Paper; Another YT video specifically covering Laser Induced Graphene;

The idea is to make your own super caps using:

• A cheap, off the shelf, 4-5 nm, laser that's arounf 5 watts
• Kapton tap or Polyimide
• A XY cam system that you can attach the laser to.
• An electrolyte. He used sulfuric acid with a wicking material to hold it. Mentions scientists would normally use a gel type of electrolyte.
• Something to enclose it in. He sandwiched it between microscope slides.

Apparently when a laser hits Polyimide it produces a type of graphene that is "foamy" giving it a large surface area, though lower conductance. When used to make interlocking fingers of a capacitor, it can hold a decent charge.

Polyimide (Laser induced Graphene) Heater

YT Video; Source Paper;

The video was mostly about super capacitors (and that info is documented in the super capacitor page) but the end of the video talked about how you could also make a high temperature, extremely even heater. Due to being made from Kapton tape the heater would degrade as the temperatures got in the 400 C range, presumably due to the adhesive breaking apart.

Carbon fiber

Carbon fiber is essentially long chains of graphite polymers. They have high tensile strength compared to their weight and are very heat resistant. Carbon fibers can be woven into a very strong fabric and if paired with a resin can retain a shape making strong, light parts.

Commercial Production

Carbon fiber is normally produced by repeatedly heating Polyacrylonitrile (referred to as PAN, (C3 H3 N)n.) in an anaerobic (no oxygen) environment. PAN is a precusor polymer to a number of other products one of which is ABS. (1, 2

The first heating cycle apparently causes a strands of PAN to form cycles bonding the nitrogen to the adjacent carbon. The second heating cycle at around 700C causes the hydrogen to off-gas causing the chain to become aromatic (very stable chemically bonded rings). The third heating at 400-600C causes two of these aromatic chains to merge into a graphite ribbon structure, off-gassing more hydrogen. The fourth at 600-1300C merges two of these graphite ribbon structures causing half the nitrogen to off-gass and producing a mostly carbon based ribbon. (3 4) Presumably subsequent heatings will make this ribbon wider and wider resulting in larger sheets and less nitrogen content.

Reference #4 seems to indicate that the commercial process is actually more complicated. I'm not sure if just the heating process is enough and the rest of the process is to produce a higher quality product or if the whole process is needed. So more research is needed.

Alternate Production

Cellulose ((C6 H10 O5)n) is slightly similar to PAN (C3 H3 N)n.) the differences being: Cellulose's chain structure is not nearly as simple as PAN's, Cellulose contains oxygen instead of nitrogen, and Cellulose has a bit more of a hydrogen to carbon ratio. However I'm curious if a similar heating process could produce a similar result.

Cellulose fibers can be fairly easily obtained in a number of ways, the one that stands out to me is using a costic soda solution to soak bamboo, which causes the cellulose fibers to easily separate. You can use the fibers for other things like clothing, but might also use it in the above process to turn into carbon fiber. You can also get long strands from things like hemp of just traditional flax.

Follow up

Found this related article, seems like they are going about it a different way but did not get far in reading it. https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/open.201800180

Notes from JJ

Okay, so the reason that PAN is used and heated to make carbon fiber is because it's already in that position to where if you heated it up, it sticks together.

You'd need to find some way to change cellulose into something that would give you an end product of (some technical term I forgot) a sheet of a bunch of planar sp2 carbons. If you just directly heat up cellulose, you're not going to get that. I think the first thing that would happen is that the beta 1,4 glycosidic linkages would break down, so you'd just end up with a bunch of smaller sugars. So you might make syrup, not carbon fiber. But maybe if you torched it even more, it would turn into carbon... I'm not entirely sure of how the chemistry of that would work out off the top of my head. But at that point, I think you're just going to be turning it into carbon, and then finding some way to link it together in a vinyl polymer that would stick to itself like PAN does when heated, and then heating it. So PAN but with more steps.

Sourcing

Iron Bacteria

YT Video; Science Direct Article;

The video is from primitive tech channel. He extracts iron using primitive tools from surface liquid that is apparently growing Iron Bacteria (Gallionella and Leptothrix). He is able to make a very simple iron knife by doing this.

Iron Bacteria is often found in people's wells making the water taste bad and needs to be treated.

My interest is weather we could cultivate the bacteria and regularly extract iron from them. It would be interesting if you could feed it something like Red Clay (Ultisol) which has high concentrations of iron oxide and extract the iron using the bacteria. It would be good to compare using iron bacteria and some other more industrial method to see which is better as far as being low maintenance and efficent.

And as a side note the same bacteria can extract manganese which is used in stainless steel production.

From CO2 and Water

According to this sci article, they came up with a way to use waste co2 and water with an electrolitic catalyst and low voltage (10 mV) to produce plastic. Article is behined paywall https://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2018/EE/C8EE00936H#!divAbstract

That electrode is a "nickel phosphides" which this article talks about making. free https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jpcb.7b06020

Another or possibly related article. free https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscatal.7b04347

Foundations

In this chapter, I will explain the foundations of cryptocurrecies so hopefully a non-technical person can understand.

Before we get started, I highly suggest reading the Bitcoin white paper for yourself either before or after reading this chapter. It is only 9 pages, and uses minimal jargon and only a bit of math which you can skip if you are not doing a deep dive. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

You do not need to read the white paper to understand my explanation or vice versa. It's just good to read the original source material. Also it is another explanation and reading both may better help you understand.

For a deeper understanding of Cryptocurrencies we first need to understand how two foundational concepts work:

1. Computer Cryptography
2. Blockchain

Computer Cryptography

Basics

Cryptography is, in short, the process of limiting access to something via obfuscation. For example, in war Cryptography is used to limit the enemy's access to knowledge by making messages nonsensical unless you know both the method and the starting point to remove the obfuscation.

So to define some terms:

• Obfuscating information is called Encrypting, Encryption, and Hashing,
• While reversing that is called Decrypting, Decryption.
• The method used to accomplish this is called an algorithm, which in general computer lingo just means "Set of steps a computer follows to produce a repeatable outcome".
• The starting point is called a key.
• The Obfuscated information is called a Hash.

Anyone with the right algorithm and key can encrypt and decrypt information to and from hashes.

With computers providing a very high rate of information processing, cryptographic algorithms needs to be complicated and hard to break by brute force.

SHA-256

One of the most widely used cryptographic algorithms in the computer security world is SHA-256.

SHA-256 is used by developers to access basically all digital infrastructure worldwide. It is like a password, but much more secure. It is estimated that with access to 2.5 million high end computers it would still take 10^57 years, far longer then the earth has existed, to break by brute force a SHA-256 encrypted hash.

A very abbreviated explanation of SHA-256 follows.

The SHA-256 algorithm uses a paired public and private key. You can generate your own personal key pair with a special program on demand, and many people will use a different public/private key pair for each thing they need to use it in, even replacing their keys regularly to make sure everything stays secure.

The public key can be used to encrypt information but not decrypt it! (in a reasonable time frame anyway) This is because there are many private keys possible for any single public key, but only one private key can decrypt the information to get the original message.

A simple example to understand why a public key can not be reversed is to consider adding two numbers. Say 15 + 13 = 28. If you are provided just 28 (what we would call the hash), you won't know what two numbers add up to create that output. You can use this fact to encrypt a message, but to decrypt it you will need to know exactly which two numbers add up to it. If you tried using 16 + 12 the message encrypted with 15 + 13 becomes nonsense.

Obviously the actual SHA-256 algorithm is more complicated then adding two numbers, but it uses this basic idea. The Public key has enough info to encrypt data into a Hash, but not decrypt the hash into data, and a private key has enough info to both encrypt to- and decrypt from- hashes.

This means it is safe to send public keys over the internet to another computer who can then encrypt information into a Hash with it and send that Hash back to you with no one being able to decrypt the hash even if they intercepted the public key you sent to the 2nd party. This allows you to limit information so only you and your 2nd party know what is being exchanged.

Sources Referenced:

• https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/cyber-security-tutorial/sha-256-algorithm
• https://www.quora.com/How-long-would-it-take-to-crack-SHA-256?share=1
• https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/45377/why-cant-we-reverse-hashes

Blockchain

Basics

Blockchain was developed in the 80s as a method to store information in a decentralized, something lacking a centralized source/authority, and distributed manner, so that no one party or group has to be fully trusted. Blockchain functions in a peer-to-peer environment where, normally, a copy of the whole blockchain exists with every single involved party, and each party is able to connect to any other party. We refer to these parties involved in the network as Nodes.

Blockchain, as the name states, is a chain of "blocks". Each block contains whatever data you need in a single entry and the order of the blocks are enforced via cryptography linking any specific block all the way back to the first starting block, called the Genesis block. Blocks are also timestamped providing a history for the chain. To add a block to the chain, a consensus of involved parties must agree to do so. Likewise the history is preserved via a consensus.

To clarify what is meant by consensus, consider ownership of a company. Someone starting a company owns 100% of that company making all decisions, but they can sell off shares of ownership in the company to make some money (essentially what the stock market facilitates). If their personal ownership in the company drops below 50% the shareholders can override decisions made by the original owners if at least 51% of the shareholders agree.

In a system using Blockchain, every Node has some sort of "ownership" over the system. It is usually equal ownership, where any individual Node's ownership changes based on the number of connected Nodes at any specific time. But there are other methods to implement the system. Point being a majority of nodes need to agree, to allow changes to the block chain to be made. Any nodes refusing to follow the majority are ignored by the majority since the refusing node's version of the Blockchain is considered invalid by the majority.

So to summarize, a Blockchain is a chain of blocks of data linked via cryptographic hashes and timestamped to keep history. It's use is based on a peer-to-peer network where everyone participating has a full copy of the blockchain, and new blocks can only be added if a consensus of nodes agrees to add the data. If a node insists on adding a block not agreed on by a majority, that node invalidates itself and is ignored by all valid nodes from that point onward.

Forking

Forking a blockchain essentially means that a new group breaks off from the original group and make their own version of the chain adding blocks to the chain based on their consideration of what is valid. Everything before the fork is exactly the same for both blockchains, but after the fork they diverge and can never be reintegrated since the cyptographic hashes linking to previous blocks are different from the fork point onward.

A fork is normally done if a minority group wants to change the underlying technology in some way that the majority do not agree to for some reason.

An example of a fork is when Bitcoin Cash forked off of Bitcoin. People who already had bitcoins suddenly had an equal amount of "bitcoin cash" since both blocks has the same shared history, but bitcoin and "bitcoin cash" continued on allowing people to trade the respective currencies separately since new entries on the two blockchains were not shared.

Bitcoin

TODO

Are Cryptocurrencies actually "Currencies"

A common claim against cryptocurrencies is that they are worthless, or put another way they have no value. For example lets look at Gold, it has a real world use as it is very good at conducting electricity. This makes it useful in certain electronics. But what about books? Books are valuable right? You pay far more for one then the paper it is made of is worth. Well the knowledge within the book, be it how to do something or entertainment, makes it more valuable. So what is Value if it isn't necessarily something with physical use?

Value

Value is made up of three things: Utility, Trust, and Scarcity. Both of these elements are partly subjective.

Utility indicates that a thing has a use. Utility is subjective in that some people have more use for some things then others. A lover of Sci-Fi has more use for such a book then one who hates it. A blacksmith has more use for a chunk of iron then an accountant. And we could go on. The properties of things makes them have use, but they only have utility to those that can use them.

Trust is another thing that makes up Value. Trust is very subjective and varies from person to person. It is based on an individual's experiences with something. Brands is a good example. People are willing to pay more for a specific brand then a comparable generic because there is trust in the brand. They have used it before and trust in the familiarity, they trust in the level of quality, they trust it will be available, and so on.

Finally there is Scarcity determined by the economic holy grail of Supply and Demand. Scarcity on it's own doesn't make something valuable but rather modifies the value if it already is valuable. It doesn't matter if only 10 books were printed of a horrible novel no one wants. But if you have something that has Utility or Trust, and the demand outpaces the supply then the value will increase.

Just Data

One of the common attacks on Bitcoin's values is "it's just data in a computer" and as such has no value. But does data really have no value? Data/Information/Knowledge, all basically the same thing, have value. The Information needed to turn chunks of iron into a plow is more valuable then the iron itself the process of applying the knowledge to the raw materials make them more valuable. Data is collected by many companies at great cost because it allows them to improve their processes, like targeting customers with more convincing ads. Data has value, but it does depend on what is in that data. So what about cryptocurrencies, specifically Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a decentralized currency. That is the type of data that makes up Bitcoin. Though really Bitcoin is made of both data and systems. From the bottom up Bitcoin is designed to be a currency, so its' value, it's utility and trust is based on that of a currency. So what is the value of a currency.

Currency

Currencies have utility in and of themselves. They store wealth as an intermediate medium and facilitate trade, both of which are extremely valuable functions. The only real alternative to Currency is Barter, the process of directly trading goods and services for other goods and services. Barter is not very convenient as it forces one of two situations:

• You need to have exactly what another person wants so you can trade for your desired product.
• One of the parties need to be willing to accept something they don't need with the hope they can trade it to another for something they do need.

On top of that, goods are often difficult to move around either due to simple bulk/weight/etc or special requirements. Even more concerning is the fact that many goods you want to trade are perishable adding a time limit to how long you can trade it.

By using a currency as a medium between one good or service and another you can defeat most of these issues. Assuming the currency actually is better then barter. So a good currency has some requirements to make it better then barter:

• Something that can store wealth.
• Something that will not rot/break apart/disappear over time.
• Something that is portable.

The first has to do Trust as disscuseed int the last section, while the second and third has to do with the form the currency takes.

Are Cryptocurrencies actually Currency

So this is the question. Bitcoin can be valuable in and of itself, if it is a good currency. Because value is based on utility and trust, and currency has utility. So we need to answer if Bitcoin Is it a good currency.

Store of Wealth

TODO

Can it Rot

TODO

Is it Portable

TODO