Fun with Coke and Mentos

Posted on June 29, 2011 by jfearnside

After a particularly stressful day at work and a long evening ahead of us we decided to take a break. There had been a potluck the day before so we had loads of Diet Coke in the office and we got to talking about that episode of Mythbusters where they tested the Mentos and Diet Coke phenomenon. In case you don’t know what I am talking about it’s the peculiar, yet vigorous, reaction you get when you drop a tube of Mentos into Coke. Basically it instantly forces the CO2 out of suspension forcing the contents of the bottle to displace violently out through the bottle neck in a stream many feet high. With nothing but office supplies we made a Mentos delivery mechanism out of paper, paperclips and a phone cord then headed out to the parking lot for some much needed fun and hi-jinx. The delivery method failed due to the Mentos twisting in the tube and getting stuck so Andrew decided to do it by hand with the expected result of him getting covered in Coke :-)
The video below is the result.

We decided to buy a kit from the excellent Steve Spangler Educational science site.
Coke and Mentos kit.

The results were much more consistent and spectacular as you can see from the photo(s) below.

Staging Area

Wow!

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“Ice Tube Clock” kit build

Posted on June 16, 2011 by Chris

I decided awhile ago that I wanted to get into electronics I collected lots of parts and pieces and tools but never did anything with them. Last Christmas my wonderful wife bought me a cool kit from www.Adafruit.com called the “Ice Tube Clock” it’s a clock made with a surplus Russian vacuum tube display “VFD”. I thought the kit was cool however I had not soldered anything that intricate before so it went on a shelf with my other bits and lives for fear I would kill this $85 kit….

Now 6 months have passed and I finally last weekend put together a few smaller kits and boards for an arduino that I have and discovered soldering is not that hard to do! I promptly pulled my cool clock kit out and began to assemble it. In all it took me about 5 hours across 2 evenings after work.

Here are the parts

This is the vacuum tube

This first part of the kit is to put together the power supply portion of the board.

This was very easy and when I tested the power output all was great. And then I failed to take pictures of the steps. So here are the pictures I did take and a bit of commentary I will do better at documenting next time…… Maybe

Kit mostly done minus the tube part.

Not the best soldering in the world but could be much much worse.

Spider tube

Spider tube spider tube… These wires were a PITA to get in the holes and straight it might have been exasperated by the fact that I was excited to plug it in and see if it worked.

Test fit

Test fitting the tube before final soldering of the crazy wires.

The moment of truth

Ohoh something is not right

Ok something is messed up why are my digits missing pieces??? Off to the Adafruit blogs to see if this happens a lot. I found that sometimes the solder joints are not good and to look for bad spots and reflow them. So I touch any spots that looked suspect with my soldering iron and prayed..

It works

Amazing it works and it looks sweet! I highly recommend this kit it’s a lot of fun to put together and the instructions and help through the forum are superb.

Check out the kit and all the other cool stuff at www.Adafruit.com

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