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ultimategreatestblog-blog · 5 years

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Birthday Cupcakes

While planning a wedding cake, it is important to keep a few basic things in mind to ensure your wedding cake is the talk of the day. And when it comes to frosting, make sure that they go perfectly with two things: your cupcakes flavour and your wedding theme. The two coat silicon polyester nonstick surface ensures that one can get fluffy cupcakes that do not stick on the surface. Combine fancy frosted designs with creative stacking patterns, and you can make a fabulous cupcake cake suitable for even the most special of occasions. You might want to put up pictures and stickers of cute paper dollies or Nancy Fancy on the floors and walls. We once had a birthday party where I put tons of decorations in various bowls and let the kids come up with their own combinations of colored frostings and decorations. Thinking of keeping the kids busy while waiting for the other guests to arrive? Add a few of those to a green frosting and the kids just love it. This is also a chance for the kids to gain new friends and learn how to interact in a fun way. I wish I could decorate with icing, I tried once and failed miserably, but I am definitely going to share this hub with my friends. To get the best birthday cupcakes follow the link.

That’s going to be the basic part; simple decorations. I will list the basic cupcake recipe ingredients, then I will list my changes to show you what I have added and subtracted. Maraschino cherries with a little of the stem still on will be very attractive alternative. It’s very important to sift the powdered sugar and cocoa powder, or else the frosting will be grainy. Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat the Sugar and Butter Together. Simple, but perfect buttercream (or "frosting" as it is elsewhere known) to use for all cupcake decorating ideas. You can go through books on how to make cupcakes for weddings in order to get ideas that you can implement. Cupcakes can also be used for the celebration and they are available in many shapes and colors. A way to do this thing is to prepare in several many shapes. Now, its time to use your imagination to decorate your cakes any way you choose. In my recipe, I use cinnamon as the dominant spice, brighten up the aroma with grated orange zest, and add some yogurt to give my cupcakes an interesting texture. Raisins add an extra touch to the flavor.

Those little wonders have been re-created in hundreds of different flavor combinations and served in shops all across the United States. I use these methods to ice when I'm baking for the scouts and need hundreds (well maybe hundreds is a slight exaggeration, but it feels like hundreds) fast! Thanks for this. I love baking cupcakes. For advance order, there is a minimum of 1 dozen cupcakes. My fondant is made, not bought, so there are no worries about it ever tasting artificial. So instead there was a palm bush made of the salvaged palm fronds. Thanks for the response about promoting art by using the Pin it site. Chill the maple-butter frosting for one hour before using. You can find acrylic roll top bread boxes with as few as one shelf, or horizontal or vertical acrylic bread boxes with several shelves. Pipe slowly around the outside of the top of the cupcake, spiralling inwards - letting the buttercream pile up in the centre. Sit the bowls inside your vase with the 7 bowls on top. I can't believe that pizza ia a cake!

You did a wonderful job on it and if I hadn't read your explanation, I would have think it was a real pizza! Over the years, I have become a major cupcake maker, my kid’s love my cupcakes. Where can I see names of cupcake bakeries? I just wanted to practice my piping and try it out, see how hard it was. Gently flare the tops of the petals outward like you would see on a real rose. My roommate is a real movie buff so I made her a cake to look like a bowl of popcorn with a movie reel and clapboard on it. For best results, keep icing bowl in refrigerator when not in use. Make sure the bowl is wide enough to carry the size of the tier above. The standard size for a muffin pan is 6 or 12 cups each measuring 2 1/2 inches in diameter.

Cupcake Gift Boxes

Many people worldwide today love cakes. There are various forms and types of cakes that you would find being produced in some part worldwide today. These differentiations usually are meant to suit the requirements a diverse market segment whose requirement for cakes has become on an exponential boost in the recent year or so. One of the most common forms of cakes may be the cup cake. A Cup cake? Probably you might want to ask.

Gluten Free may be the new kid on the market so far as a food restrictive diet for medical reasons. In reality, a gluten free diet benefits because it's a nutritious diet style that might improve everyone's overall being. It promotes wholesome and healthy substances that you'd find on any healthy grocery list. With some education on gluten free diets it is possible to buy gluten free.

What's in the name? Well, for cupcakes, a lot! Cupcakes go as far back for the 19th Century where they were often called "number cakes." These bite-sized cakes were included according for the quantity of cups essential for the required ingredients. Another theory to the origin from the cupcake name could be the vessel when the cakes were baked. Ramekins, tin or small clay cups were said to have contained the essential ingredients for cupcakes upon their initiation. Oddly enough, bakers today still choose to bake these fun treats within the same containers.

A big trend in weddings right this moment can be a long table with several cakes as an alternative to one large central cake. You can use this idea because inspiration to your cupcake display also. Set out an extended table, make several pedestals or display bases on it, then load each one with your sweets. This is an excellent display option if you intend to own several flavors, because then you can certainly put a different flavor on each base. As for the bases themselves, there are a variety of possibilities. For a rustic wedding, use polished wood slabs. If you like the vintage style, choose classic white porcelain pedestals with cutwork borders. Vary the pedestal height for visual interest. Another neat idea is to use clear Plexiglass boxes and stuff all of them with flowers before topping with cupcakes. Round flowers for example hydrangeas or carnations work especially well because of this display idea, which combines the romance of flowers with all the clean lines of recent design.

You can use anything it is possible to dream up to top your cupcakes and make them unique and attractive. The baking or bulk food stores carry many ideas. They have little shaped candies that could add color, whimsy and a bit of crunch in your cupcake toppings. You can add chopped nuts, break up chocolate candy bars or slivered candied peel to incorporate more flavor for your cupcakes. You can mold your own personal figures or designs from modeling chocolate to make fanciful cupcakes, or you are able to use marzipan in various shaped designs. Try using cookie cutters for shaping your cupcake cut-outs.

#Birthday Cupcakes

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markjsaterfiel66 · 6 years

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Hackbot in the Morning

I love coming in to work early; normally I get in around 6:45 a.m. Very few people are here at that time, and the ones that are? They get it. It’s about as close to freedom a working adult can expect.

On a particularly quiet morning very recently, I found myself thinking, “I’ve never made a bot with a Pi… isn’t that one of the things that everybody’s gotta do sooner or later? I wonder what it takes to actually get something up and running.”

So I decided that, with minimal effort and materials expended, I would give it a shot while there was nobody here to tell me otherwise – nothing fancy, just a platform that’ll drive around, to which I can ultimately attach more junk (it started with some junk reclaimed from other projects). Check the end of this post for a consolidated list of items used.

I started off with a Raspberry Pi 3 I mounted to an acrylic plate to try to give it some weight to hold it down when there’s a slew of cables stuck in it. I hit my pile of junk in my basement for more parts… and I came across this old project:

That there (above) is the remains of my “Little Dude” project I did a video for a while back, using servo wheels glued together as pulleys… good times, good times… Anyway, that’s a pair of gear motors (ratio unknown, whatever - let’s rock!) wired up to a TB6612 dual-channel motor driver good to 1.2A per channel. Sweet! This bot was just about building itself!

I figured could mount the motors and driver directly onto the acrylic with hot glue, although if anything got too hot, it would fall off. I decided to just really gum up the motors so any heat couldn’t melt all of the hot glue and stick to the edges of the driver board. This bot wouldn’t be drawing that much current. If I remember right the stall current on the motors is around 330mA, and we’ll be nowhere near that driving this little beastie around the office.

When it came to power, for initial testing I’d have to have all the cables and junk plugged in anyway, but Hackbot needed localized life support if he’s eventually going to romp free… not to mention headless operation. I could have started it with all the junk plugged in, then yank the keyboard, mouse and monitor out and set it on the floor, but that was definitely a short-term solution. I let that part go while I got the rudidments in place. In the meantime, I had to make a little regulator circuit with a 7805 – that should be good to an amp and a half, so it should cover me for the Pi and the motors. But a two-cell lipo is about 8.4V fully charged, and at a guess I’ll maybe draw 500mA average (totally ballparking here), giving me (8.4V - 5V)*0.5A = 1.7W to dissipate on that TO220. It would probably get hot unless I heatsink it.

Programming this in Python was easy enough, as it’s just GPIO manipulation. I wasn’t going to try and PWM the motor driver, as I had the gear motors and I knew they were slow. If they were faster, I might have had to worry about feeding them PWM to control the speed.

I then created a wiring diagram of sorts:

The hookup was simple enough. Each channel on the TB6621 is driven by three pins: [A/B]IN1 and [A/B]IN2, which determine the direction, and PWM[A/B], which allows you to adjust the speed of the channel through a PWM signal applied here. There’s also a standby signal (STBY) that will enable/disable both channels. That’s seven lines total, and they all get a GPIO line.

Running motor power through the RasPi wasn’t really the smartest thing I could do, but 1) the motors were originally rated for 6V and the lipo’s going to be more, and 2) I bet it wouldn’t be a problem at this stage, (though I wondered if I’d get motor noise back to the RasPi). Checking the TB6621 datasheet showed lots of noise-suppressing diodes on the motor outputs. Clearly, destiny wanted me to do this.

There were still a couple of things I needed to make this viable: wheels and a caster. Oh sure, I could have used those hot-glued servo wheels that were originally on the motors (check the first pic above) for some extra jank-factor. But I felt like I was already up against enough sketchy design, so I just bought them. Pro tip: that caster is a little tight at first. You can loosen it up by clamping that ball between the plastic with a pliers and giving it a little squeeze (not too much, as you can’t un-squeeze it).

After some hot glue magic plus a minimum of wiring, the bottom of Hackbot looked like this:

The top looks like this:

Now I had the physical platform close, but I still had to make a little regulator board. I figured it really didn’t need to be anything special, just an L7805 regulator, plus an electrolytic cap of 100uF or so on the output oughta do it. I gave it a two-pin male header to plug into the two-cell lipo, and snatched a micro USB plug from some unsuspecting cable to connect to the 5V out.

Then I mounted it on one of the stand-offs holding the RasPi down.

Another view:

The PCB that the regulator is mounted on is from an old product line of shaped PCB’s that we used to have, that one being a pentagon. It was lying around, so I used it. The idea here was that the battery will sit on top of the RasPi in some fashion (I can work out the specifics later) while plugged into that two-pin male header you see there.

From there, I turned to code. There’s definitely more junk to add, but that’s for another day. The car’s got wheels, right? Let’s go driving!

#Hackbot.py #Just a little test code to run around the floor a bit import RPi.GPIO as GPIO import time #a couple of delay constants leg = 2 turn = 0.5 #set up control pins for motor driver STBY = 31 AIN1 = 33 AIN2 = 35 PWMA = 37 BIN1 = 32 BIN2 = 36 PWMB = 38 GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BOARD) #use board pin numbers #set the GPIO's to outputs GPIO.setup(STBY, GPIO.OUT) GPIO.setup(BIN1, GPIO.OUT) GPIO.setup(AIN1, GPIO.OUT) GPIO.setup(AIN2, GPIO.OUT) GPIO.setup(BIN2, GPIO.OUT) GPIO.setup(PWMA, GPIO.OUT) GPIO.setup(PWMB, GPIO.OUT) #set initial condiions, STBY #is low, so no motors running GPIO.output(STBY, GPIO.LOW) GPIO.output(AIN1, GPIO.HIGH) GPIO.output(AIN2, GPIO.LOW) GPIO.output(PWMA, GPIO.HIGH) GPIO.output(BIN1, GPIO.HIGH) GPIO.output(BIN2, GPIO.LOW) GPIO.output(PWMB, GPIO.HIGH) #movement is governed by the 4 #following functions. These will #go into their own library, ultimately. def go_forward(run_time): GPIO.output(AIN1, GPIO.LOW) GPIO.output(AIN2, GPIO.HIGH) GPIO.output(BIN1, GPIO.LOW) GPIO.output(BIN2, GPIO.HIGH) GPIO.output(STBY, GPIO.HIGH) #start time.sleep(run_time) GPIO.output(STBY, GPIO.LOW) #stop def turn_left(run_time): GPIO.output(AIN1, GPIO.HIGH) GPIO.output(AIN2, GPIO.LOW) GPIO.output(BIN1, GPIO.LOW) GPIO.output(BIN2, GPIO.HIGH) GPIO.output(STBY, GPIO.HIGH) #start time.sleep(run_time) GPIO.output(STBY, GPIO.LOW) #stop def turn_right(run_time): GPIO.output(AIN1, GPIO.LOW) GPIO.output(AIN2, GPIO.HIGH) GPIO.output(BIN1, GPIO.HIGH) GPIO.output(BIN2, GPIO.LOW) GPIO.output(STBY, GPIO.HIGH) #start time.sleep(run_time) GPIO.output(STBY, GPIO.LOW) #stop def reverse(run_time): GPIO.output(AIN1, GPIO.HIGH) GPIO.output(AIN2, GPIO.LOW) GPIO.output(BIN1, GPIO.HIGH) GPIO.output(BIN2, GPIO.LOW) GPIO.output(STBY, GPIO.HIGH) #start time.sleep(run_time) GPIO.output(STBY, GPIO.LOW) #stop #Then we make a simple driving patern and loop try: while True: #go forward go_forward(leg) #turn right? turn_right(turn) #go forward go_forward(leg) #turn right? turn_right(turn) #go forward go_forward(leg) #turn left turn_left(turn) #go forward go_forward(leg) #turn left turn_left(turn) #reverse reverse(leg) except KeyboardInterrupt: GPIO.cleanup()

To run this, I powered the Pi from my two-cell lipo with all the cables plugged in, just long enough to open a terminal window and run that code. Then, I quick-like yanked all the cords out, put it on the floor and let-r-rip!

Look at that thing lay it down! Am I right?? Those motors are really slow, and we don’t sell that particular one anymore. I want to say they’re geared 300:1…? Or maybe 300RPM? The concept is hereby proven, and I can change those motors out if I really want to.

Things I could have done better

1) Like I knew it would, the regulator gets hot. Not so hot that I can’t touch it, but I don’t want to for very long. The current draw is around 315mA sitting idle, and around 500mA-ish when we’re driving around, so it’s dissipating over 1.5W when driving. That’s a bit much for a TO-220 package by itself, so I should put a hunk of metal on it.

2) Running motor current through the Pi, while convenient for today, is kinda dumb for the long term. I can get away with it for now because the motor current is relatively low, but the current path between the USB plug and 5V on the header is in no way designed to do this. I should really run the motor voltage directly from the regulator.

3) Headless operation: plugging cables in and out to do this is no good. Pinocchio wanted to be a real boy; so does Hackbot.

4) Hot glue. You know what? The hot glue is working for me. Saved me a ton of time.

Those are the things that gotta happen before anything else gets added. What to add?

What comes next

There’s a bunch of GPIO left available on the Pi header, including SPI, I2C and UART interfaces, so there’s a lot of room for adding junk. I can’t add anything particularly analog, but I don’t think I need to. But anything with a digital interface is fair game – distance/proximity sensors, GPS, environmental sensors… it just depends on what your ultimate goal is, or what sensors you want play with. This would make an interesting mobile test platform for new gear.

For myself, I’m less about getting tiny bots to do my will, and more about, “That thing is sweet! I wish I was two inches tall so I could get in and drive!” So it’ll probably get a camera at some point, probably an OSD to keep me updated with various info. Then LEDs, Troll hair, googly eyes…

Recap: Materials Used

To extricate the list from my story-telling style:

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SparkFun Motor Driver - Dual TB6612FNG (1A)

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Voltage Regulator - 5V

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Lithium Ion Battery - 1000mAh 7.4v

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Ball Caster Metal - 3/8"

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Micro Gearmotor - 130 RPM (6-12V)

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Wheel 32x7mm

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