!blog - corey menscher

Yesterday I presented on the topic of Abiogenic Petroleum Origin in my Sustainable Energy class. One of our textbooks is titled “The Bottomless Well”, and while it has nothing to do with abiotic oil, it reminded me of the topic.

The generally accepted model of “fossil fuels” states that oil comes from the fossilized remains of organic matter (plants and animals) sitting within sedimentary layers of rock that have been subjected to geologic forces over millions of years. But the theory of Abiogenic Oil Generation postulates that the creation of petroleum deposits dates back to the formation of the earth itself. The hydrocarbons already existed within the solar system, and instead of vaporizing into space, were subsumed into the earth’s mantle. It’s kind of a “crackpot” theory in most circles, but there is some traction. Much of the science is valid. But it will be a very long time until we can determine its true viability, as the depths at which the abiotic oil deposits are supposed to exist are over 150km deep. The deepest we can currently drill (and only for isolated projects) is about 6km!!

This is my creation for our first assignment in Networked Objects. It’s a shaker using lentil beans, a plastic container, vibration sensors, and an arduino mini + breadboard. Shaking the device triggers an animation of my macbook’s desktop shaking. It’s just an 11 frame loop of screenshots I altered to make it look like it’s shaking. The desktop itself does not shake. The effect is pretty good when using Processing’s “present” runtime mode.

Most of the issues I encountered were related to the vibration sensors I purchased from Parallax.com. These are plastic piezoelectric sensors. I am using 5.1v zener diodes to filter the voltage spikes generated by the piezos. A 1MΩ resistor pulls the input pin to ground, giving me a nice range to work with. It tooks a while (and a lot of bugging Tim Twyllman) to figure out how to get useful values out of the sensors, but I think the final result is prett good.

This was also my first experience with an Arduino Mini. It’s an amazing little device, but I did not own a USB-to-serial breakout board and had to borrow one. The positive is that the whole device fits on a small breadboard that is adhered to the container’s top…but it sure doesn’t leave a lot of room to insall components. It may be hard to see from the video, but the side with the analog inputs is a mess of zener diodes and resistors. I had to be creative with positioning the connections, as well as figuring out good places to connect the sensors to ground. But in the end, it works pretty well!