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You are here: Home / Guest Appearance / #618 – Refrigerators and Robots with Amitabh Shrivastava

#618 – Refrigerators and Robots with Amitabh Shrivastava

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Welcome Amitabh Shrivastava of Refrigediro.org and Tinkrmind!

  • Amitabh moved from Physics into Engineering. He did an internship at Brandeis for astophysics and radio astronomy and realized astrophysics mostly coding these days.
  • Kit for teaching teachers in India
  • There was a limited Electronics scene in India. Amitabh grew up in Bangalore (Bengaluru)
  • Manufacturing in India has been growing, including in the silicon space. Chris used to work at a place that had a CM in Bangalore.
  • Gaming startup making tag games using LoRa
  • XBee
  • Logistics company that tracked 2 wheelers. Their breakout product was a laser scanner for packages.
  • Amitabh went to ITP at NYU, which is a technology and art crossover program. Past guest of the show Matt Richardson also went there.
  • Creative aspects vs technical aspects.
  • Amitabh enjoyed consulting for other artist, much like past guests Mike Harrison and Todd Bailey discussed.
  • Programmable Air is a kit that allows people to more easily build soft robots and use pumps.
  • Chris and Amitabh met at Teardown 2019. That was also the event where Chris recorded with Joshua and Zach, before recording again this year.
  • A “jammer gripper” is a soft robot that allows you to pick up arbitrarily shaped objects using friction.
  • “Backpack inflatable car” from Otherlab
  • Open Source Project
  • Programmable Air was crowdfunded on Crowd Supply. As such, it’s still available on Mouser.
  • The valves in the kit were meant for keurig machines. Spec sheets are super basic for mechanical components.
  • Chris saw Amitabh at Supercon 22 wearing a backpack refrigerator. It’s called “Refrigediro“
  • Amitabh gave a talk about the project at Hackaday Supercon 2022
  • The source of the name is “Harry potter and the methods of rational thinking“
  • Refrigeration is an old industry
  • PV=nRT
  • Kipp Bradford and Adam Savage video on building tiny refrigeration.
  • Other uses for small scale refrigeration is vaccine storage, cold chain storage.
  • Ammonia refrigeration allows you to keep things cold with a fire.
  • Gradient window cooler is a heat pump with a cool form factor. Not shipping yet though?
  • Modding an icemaker
  • Follow Amitabh on Instagram or YouTube for his latest experiments and builds. Follow him most places as “Tinkrmind”

Comments

  1. Vivek says

    February 6, 2023 at 9:53 pm

    Wonderful and amazing full of Innovative informations

    • Vinay Shrivastav says

      February 7, 2023 at 5:32 am

      Good inovation very useful.

  2. SeanB says

    February 7, 2023 at 10:07 am

    Will say that most window wall units are easy to convert to be a heat pump. All you need is the reversing valve, the reversible expansion valve, which basically just has a different length of capillary tubing, depending on direction of flow, to control the expansion, and a different thermal sensor for temperature, plus a second sensor for the coil to detect it freezing up. If you already have electronic controls there is likely already a program for it to be a heat pump, as the same microcontrollers are used for them, so all you need is a extra relay on the board.

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