Making a Vacuum chamber at home

Today I am telling you about a vacuum chamber I have built at home. This is going to help me perform many experiments. You will see more posts coming soon about this topic.

I built it with a simple jar, a big syringe and aquarium equipment link tubing and valves. You can find more find details in the video below.

I had to drill two holes in the lid one for the pipe and another for a sensor.

I used the BME280 sensor to measure the pressure inside with the help of a Microbit. This is what the sensor looks like.

To read the values I installed the Enviro:Bit extension in the Microbit. This is the code I used. As you can see, with the BME280 you can also measure temperature and humidity.

In this project we also learnt the importance of sealing the jar well as the air molecules are incredibly small and they will try to get get in and ruin your vacuum. I used a hot glue gun to seal the gap in between and around the cables.

This is what the finished setup looks like.

In this video you will see I brought the pressure down to about 300hPa (hectopascals). For reference, pressure in mount Everest is about 325hPa, which means we reached a higher equivalent altitude than mount Everest. But that is not all, in another test we brought it down to 160hPa which is like climbing to 13km ... Everest is only 8.8km. This is also higher than passenger planes that typically fly at 10km. Enjoy the video!