This newsletter was released on May 16th, 2012.

Hi! This is the twentieth edition of the NerdKits Newsletter, which we publish to keep you and the world up to date with everything going on at NerdKits.

1. New Video Tutorial: DIY Sous-Vide Cooker
2. Awesome Projects to Watch
3. CircuitLab Reaches 10,000+ Registered Users

NEW VIDEO TUTORIAL: DIY SOUS-VIDE COOKER

Sous-vide cooking is very exciting for engineers and tinkerers because it takes a mostly scientific approach to making extremely tasty food. Combine that with the opportunity to tinker with household appliances, and the opportunity to talk about thermal systems, feedback systems, and make them all work together with a microcontroller, and you have yourself a really cool DIY project.

For our sous-vide cooker we used a $15 crock pot from Wal-mart, and used a microcontroller to build the feedback loops that keep the water at a precise temperature. On the project page and video tutorial we cover everything that went into making the project, including the thermal modeling of the crock pot, the feedback system, and the electronics to control the power to the crock pot.

Check out:

http://www.nerdkits.com/videos/sous-vide/

for the full project tutorial. Along with the code and concepts, we even include the recipe for delicious sous-vide scallops!

AWESOME PROJECTS TO WATCH

We always enjoy featuring cool projects that users post on our forums. This time though, we are featuring cool projects to watch! Neither of these projects are quite finished, but they show plenty of promise and have the potential to spark some great discussion and ideas.

User awkwardsaw is building a wireless guitar which he posted about here:

http://www.nerdkits.com/forum/thread/2284/

It sounds like he is just getting started, so if anybody has any ideas or suggestions, make sure to chime in!

User banerjen is putting together a chess playing robot for his final year in college. It looks like it is coming along quite nicely, and we look forward to seeing the progress!

http://www.nerdkits.com/forum/thread/2302/

CIRCUITLAB REACHES 10,000+ REGISTERED USERS

A few short weeks ago in the last newsletter we announced the public launch of CircuitLab, an in-browser schematic capture and circuit simulation tool we've been developing over the past year. We're happy to announce that we hit the 10,000 registered user milestone -- in less than 10 weeks after our public launch! If you haven't taken CircuitLab for a spin yet, give it a try and let us know what you think:

https://www.circuitlab.com/

THANKS!

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and for being such great customers. Make sure you tell your friends and neighbors about NerdKits so we can keep the world's DIY spirit alive!

Best wishes,

Humberto & Mike NerdKits, L.L.C. http://www.nerdkits.com/

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