Paragon Butter Warmer

Below is a summary and some pictures/ video of the Paragon Butter warmer with both the old and new container.
I added enough water (2.5 cups) to the inside unit to make the container float. It does wobble when empty. I then added 1 cup of water to the container. No more floating, and plenty steady when pumping.

I then set the thermostat as high as it would go, and put a candy thermometer in the container water. The ambient temp was 70 F. After 4 minutes, the temperature reached 75 F (as low as my thermometer would go). I took readings every 5 minutes for 1 hour. The voltage was 122 VAC, and the unit drew 1.67 Amps (203.75 Watts) as measured by a Kill A Watt EZ P3 gauge.


5 min = 85 F
10 min = 110 F
15 min = 125 F
20 min = 150 F
25 min = 165 F
30 min = 175 F
35 min = 185 F
40 min = 190 F
45 min = 195 F
50 min = 200 F
60 min = 200 F

So far I like the new design, but all I have heated is water. Steam does escape around the outer ring, and the water in the heated section barely reaches a boil at 1 hour which seems reasonable.

The bottle and holder for the original design was begining to rust and the bottle had deformed (bulged) on the bottom and would no longer stand upright without holding.

The new design is much cleaner and easier to work with.

Below is a quick video of the container when inserted empty. In the second video 1 cup of liquid was added to the inner cup making the unit stable with no bobbing and very little movement when pumping. You can also freely rotate the pump in any direction since it is not attached to the container.

Another Update to the 6500UB

Just finished adding the new firmware 1.09 to the Epson 6500UB, along with an improvement to the Frame Interpolation module. The projector is much smoother with FI on LOW now, though I didn't notice any changes to Normal and High. I use LOW for normal TV viewing, and Normal or High for sports and animated dvd's. I still prefer the1080p24 4:4 pull-down for viewing film based material.

Updating the 6500

Finally, an improvement in the HDMI handshaking on the Epson 6500. This projector has been painfully slow when changing resolutions or sources. With firmware 1.08, the handshake time has been reduced to a more manageable time, though still not as speedy as my old AE700. At least not changes can be made to the menu items without having to wait 25 seconds or more for the picture to return.

Some Videos of the 6500

I captured some videos today of the 6500. The first shows the cold startup time. The 6500 had been off all night, the BD-35 was already started and on the main menu screen of Kill Bill 2. The video chain is as follows:
BD-35 --> DVDO Edge --> SR805 --> 6500

The power on occurs approxiamately 5 seconds after the start of the video.



The second video shows the time it takes to start playing "Iron Man" after the projector has been started.





The third video is High an Low lamp, and the auto iris function. The basic idea was to capture the fan noise and shutter noise. Unfortunately, the Pentax Optio A20 has a very poor microphone. The auto color balance of the camera is also quite poor in low lighting, so these videos do not represent the image quality of the 6500.