Sunday, November 2, 2008

Epic Fail!

The initial tests of my 2D Menticulator device failed in so many ways, it's just not funny!

To start with, the pneumatic cola dispensing system doesn't work -- because the bladder used to force the cola out of the bottle acts as a massive nexus of nucleation sites. As soon as you try and put the bladder into the coke bottle, all the CO2 comes out of solution! Foom! So unless I can come up with a system that either avoids the problem or can repressurize the bottle with C02 to put it back into solution, all the lovely pneumatic gear I cobbled together is useless, at least for the purposes I originally intended.

And to make matters worse, even careful attempts to decant the soda into the 2-D menticulator failed miserably. Despite being made with panels of carefully cleaned acrylic, it is rough enough that most of the CO2 comes out of solution and sticks to the walls, both reducing the amount of CO2 available for menticulation and obscuring the view of the convection process. Again, I'd have to repressurize the apparatus to force the gas back into solution.

I think the video I shot of the final test says it all. What happens at the end is just icing on the fail cake, so to speak.



I therefore find myself compelled to choke out the hateful lines, "Curses! Foiled again!"

On the bright side, I have yet to have to utter the deathless lines that doom an Overlord to eternal ignominy -- "I would've have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddling kids!"

In other news, work on a LED-based lighting apparatus for the Exilim camera is proceeding fairly well; I'll be posting on that soon.