Tasty Home Medicine
Today, I decided I would try my hand at a simple Irish home remedy that turned into a popular soft drink. GINGER ALE! Ginger ale was used some time ago to treat anything that ailed you but now thanks to John McLaughlin, it's more commonly associated with a refreshing soft drink.
Ginger has long been used to help settle upset stomachs and ease nausea, it's these proposed properties that really made me want to give it a try. My wife has been suffering from nausea quite badly lately and I thought this would be a fantastic solution (if it works). It's all natural and quite easy to make.
Here's my recipe for Ginger Soda:
• 2 Cups Fresh cut ginger (slice into about 1/8 inch slices)
• 2 Cups filtered water
• 2 Cups white sugar
• 1 tsp Pure Vanilla Extract
• 2 tsp Dry Ginger Powder (not required but adds to the zippyness)
Combine the ginger, sugar and water and heat until simmering. You'll simmer the mix until the liquid has reduced to about 1/2. It'll be syrupy in consistency. Add the vanilla and dry ginger powder and stir well. Remove from heat and strain mixture. Let the syrup cool to room temperature and then add about 3 tablespoons syrup to 16 ounces soda water (this will vary on individual tastes), stir well and enjoy! If you want, you can add a bit of fresh Mint and a squeeze of lime to zest it up a bit!
But WAIT! Don't throw away that ginger! It will make a fantastic treat and here's how. Take the cooked ginger from the recipe above and mix it well with 1 cup white sugar. Make sure each slice is liberally coated with sugar. Place the coated ginger slices on a cookie tray evenly spaced out and put in a preheated oven at 225F. Let them dry for about 3 hours in the oven, they should be dry but still chewy! Yum-O!
Ginger ready to go!
Candy ginger ready to dry
Candied Ginger
1938 RCA 96T Radio
I finally received my vintage radio today. I had purchased it as a "non-working" radio and really only wanted the wood case for one of my other projects which I will talk 
about later when I get it completed. Anyhow, I couldn't resist looking through all the amazing components and it wasn't long before I started wondering how such a fantastically built radio could be broken... The tubes looked good and it wasn't until I pulled them out to clean them up that I noticed a loose wire which was easily fixed. Well, after an hour and half, I've got the old radio working! I never planned on refurbishing it, now I am thinking twice. It's an all-American, beautiful piece of history and I almost feel drawn to bringing her back to her full potential....more to come....
Paracord Dog Collars
Man's best friend is a saying that couldn't be any truer than it is in my house! Recently, Rox, the monarch of our pack had bladder surgery to remove some stones. Poor dear has had a rough time recovering so I thought I'd try to cheer him up with a new paracord dog collar. These collars, also known as soloman's bars have been on my learning radar for some time now and I could learn how to make these while cheering up my boy Rox, let's do it!
I actually made two and should finish up the last tomorrow. Can't leave out the other dogs after all..I've attached a few pictures at the bottom of this post of the finished product, solid blue and a two-tone, which I really liked!
A Borax Snowflake?
My wife found a fantastic article on Craftzine showing how to make a neat borax snowfake. She took some of my pipe cleaners and made a small snowflake which will soak in the borax solution overnight, the end result being a very faintly blue snowflake! Cool huh?
Directions: 3 tbsp Borax per 1 cup boiling water. 1 drop blue food coloring per cup of water.
ATTINY13A Automated Dog Stairs
So I finally got my next shipment of PCB boards from BatchPCB.com. The boards were perfect, not one mfg issue (I suspect this is mostly thanks to what I learned from SparkFun.com). It's fantastically rewarding to see your ideas come to life, I posted here originally about the Arduino controlled dog stairs I had built but I wasn't satisfied. I wanted to free up the Arduino, it's not what a development board is for anyhow. I have since crossed the hurdle of building my own code in C using AVRStudio. I decided upon the ATTINY13A chip because it was small and really had just enough functionality to make this project work as I had wanted it to. The Arduino was overkill; an ATMEGA328 is WAY overkill for this project. I've learned so much about AVR programming I can't even believe how far I've come. I've posted the AVR source code, high resolution pictures and the eagle files so you can build your own. I figure I've got no more than $10 invested in this not including the stairs!
And here are the boards I got from BatchPCB.com the other day.
- Title : AVRDogStairsSmall
Caption : Images and AVR Code
File name : AVRDogStairsSmall.zip
Size : 220 kB
LED Fire For This Year’s Jack-O-Latern
Anyone who knows my wife knows that she loves to "fall-ify" as much as she loves to decorate for Halloween! This year I found an example using LEDs to
simulate a flickering fire. I decided this would be perfect to put inside our jack-o-latern and as soon as I got home today from work, I whipped up a working version for myself. I've attached a ZIP file which contains a few high-res pictures and the embedded C code you can use to program any AVR. I've used an ATTINY13A for this as I have a bunch laying around and they work perfectly for this project. They are also very cheap, I got mine from DigiKey for .87 each. The whole project cost me about $3.50 excluding the batteries. I think I may expand on this design a bit to include a photo-transistor and a small solar panel to only turn the circuit on at night and recharge the batteries during the day...Once I get the updated version, I'll update this post. Check out the video below of the LED Fire in action!
- Title : LEDFire
Caption : LED Fire
File name : LEDFire.zip
Size : 809 kB