STEAM with Dad

To round up the blog series about the vacuum chamber I am going to do a very cool experiment. I will show you how to boil water at lower temperature than normal. I am sure you know that water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius and boils at 100 degrees, but this is only true at sea level. For example, if you climb Mt Everest and try to boil an egg, it will take you way longer because up there water boils at only 68 degrees. The cool thing is that with my vacuum chamber I can achieve even lower pressures than Mt Everest, which is like climbing even higher. This also means that I can bring the boiling point of water even lower. To understand why all this happens you need to understand a phase diagram. To see my explanation and the experiment make sure you watch the video. During this project I also got to learn about the critical point and supercritical fluids that occur at much higher pressures than it is safe for me to do at home. If you are interested to learn about that topic you can watch ...

Even though my vacuum chamber is quite basic, now that I have it there is no shortage of ideas to do with it. I once heard the saying that "nobody can hear you scream in space". So I decided to to see if it was true. First I learnt that sound consists of waves of air pressure. That explains why you can't hear sounds in space, because there is no air. Sound waves are longitudinal which means that air particles oscillate forwards and backwards much like a slinky. This is very different to other waves like light where they oscillate sideways like when you shake a string. I also learnt about amplitude and frequency. Amplitude is what defines the how loud the sound is. Whereas frequency determines the pitch, the higher the frequency the higher the pitch is. During my research I learnt about other things like the Doppler effect and how speakers work. A thing I particularly enjoyed was this video from Animagraffs which is one of my favourite channels in YouTube:  https://www.you...

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...

During science week I saw a conference from an astrophysicist showing us photos of stars. He told us what a reflector telescope is and how it uses a parabolic mirror. So I asked my dad about parabolas and he told me about the conic sections. Conic sections are different shapes you get by cutting a cone at different angles. I decided to see this by myself using Tinkercad. You can find other posts in the blog talking about Tinkercad if you are interested. It is very easy to use. These are all the sections I created When you cut a cone horizontally you get a circle. Here we have represented the circle in yellow. If you cut a little bit more inclined than horizontal you get an ellipse. Here you can see three different ellipses at different angles in red colour and how the first one compares with the circle. The more you incline the cut, the stretchier it gets. Ellipses are cool because that's the type of orbit planets do around the Sun If you keep inclining the cut eventually you reach...

The idea for this experiment came from learning about forces in school. I wanted to make an experiment to share my new knowledge with my class. This experiment is about seeing how much a spring will stretch if a certain amount of weight pulls from it. This is called Hooke's law, after the scientist that first proofed this concept, Robert Hooke. Procedure I attached a spring under a table with a hook at the end, so that I could hang different weights. I also fixed a ruler to the leg of the table to do the measurements Then I created different weights by putting water in a bottle for specific amounts of weight. For reference 100 ml of water is 100 grams. Next I hung the bottle and measured the amount of stretching on the spring from its original position I made note of the measurements in my notebook and then put them on a graph I discovered that the points formed a line. That's very interesting! That made me think, can I use this graph to predict what will happen if I hang any w...

What inspired me to make this project was my teacher's farm. She has 75 chickens and she complains that snakes are a problem and also getting up early in the morning to open the chicken coop. So I decided to make two robots to solve her problem. The first robot opens the chicken coop automatically at day time and closes at night time. The second robot goes around the farm and captures any snakes so that they can't have chicken for breakfast. Then it carries the snake out of the farm making sure it doesn't damage any of my teacher's precious eggs and chickens in the process. To solve it I had to learn new skills such as my blocks, basic line following algorithms and sensors I had never worked with before.   This is a video demonstrating the solution I made.

Have you ever tried growing crystals at home? If you visit the shops with your parents, I am sure you have seen crystal growing kits before, but there are also plenty of tutorials online so I decided to do at home because I knew I would learn more. You can make many different type of crystals with every day items, but I choose sugar because apart from looking nice they are edible. Every crystal starts with the same process, by making a saturated solution. A solution is when we dissolve something called the "solute" into a liquid called the "solvent". In my case, sugar is the solute and water is the solvent. At the beginning if we put some sugar in the water and stir it will disappear, but if we keep adding sugar, eventually it will not disappear. This point is what we call a saturated solution.  Normally, you would expect that the amount of solute you put in is less than the solvent. That is true for most things, but not for sugar. Surprisingly, you can put up to a ...

Originally, the main reason why I made Minecraft salvation was; unlike the other projects, due to a school exam. And in case you thought I was a PhD, I'm not, and yes, I go to school, hence, some of my projects originate with an exam or a test. The game story line is about a group of Minecraft mobs (living things that are not humans in Minecraft) which decided to destroy the Minecraft world and turn it into cardboard. The goal of the game is to kill the five mobs: Creeper, Stray, Skeleton, Warden and Ender dragon. Only then, will Minecraft world survive so that all the kids and adults in the world can play Minecraft again; actually, realistically not the adults.  At the beginning of the game you can choose your favourite launcher and ball. You are then given ten shots to shoot all the non moving targets:  Creeper, Stray, Skeleton and Warden and the moving target, the Ender dragon. If you don't manage to defeat them in ten shots or less you loose and Minecraft will be destroyed...

In this blog post I am going to show you a prototype of a security system I created some time ago. It involves 2 LEDs with resistors, a servo and a Microbit V2 if you want to hear sounds. This is the code. As you can see the A and B buttons add A's and B's to a string variable called "keystroke". Then when you press A+B it compares "keystroke" with "password". As you can see the password is "ABA" but you can set it to whatever you want. I have recorded a video with the demo. Enjoy!

  Today I will be telling you about a mission called Europa a Clipper. Mission The main goal of the mission is to find whether there could be life under the surface of Europa. Mission will launch on October 2024 and arrive to Jupiter on 2030. The mission will end on 2034 after completing 20 flybys as close as 25 kilometres (2.5 times higher than a plane) to scan the entire moon. Spacecraft Europa Clipper is the largest spacecraft ever developed by NASA. Since it has to travel so far, it has an array of solar panels which is 27 metres wide when deployed. All electronics are shielded in a titanium and aluminium vault to protect them from Jupiter's radiation. Destination Europa is one of the four moons discovered by Galileo. Europa is the second closest moon to Jupiter in between Io and Ganymede. Io is the most volcanic body in our solar system. Europa has the biggest ocean in the solar system and Ganymede is the biggest moon in the solar system. Joining the mission Yo...

This project is about building a device that measures how long you have been in the sun. This is very important in Australia because of the ozone layer. They always tell us in school to reapply sunscreen every 2 hours but I am using this project for a coding challenge. This project uses the onboard LEDs as a brightness sensor. The detects all kind of light, not only ultra-violet which is the real danger, but it still helps me prove the idea. A real product should use an UV sensor and be more compact. This is the code. It uses a variable to count how many seconds you have been under the sun. The Micro:bit warns you with a sound if it has gone over the time limit, so to run this code you will need a Micro:bit version 2. After testing the code in the sun and indoors I set the brightness limit to 250. When the reading is below 250 it will not count. Pressing button A shows you how long you have been in the sun. Once you reapply sunscreen you need to press button B to restart. The time limi...