SHAC: check out front page of gizmodo
BRAIN: coffee stuff
SHAC: penis pump
BRAIN: you used one that belonged to [friend who is a porn star]
BRAIN: think about it
SHAC: stfu
BRAIN: you brought it up man
SHAC: and you’re rubbing in my face
SHAC: wow i just made it 10x worse
BRAIN: yeah there’s an image

These guys caused quite a splash raising a boatload of money for their expresso maker. Pretty cool.

The media has been calling it an “open source” espresso maker… yet only the software is open source, and that is the PID control software for the temperature. From what I can tell they didn’t write it either. Sort of related: check out the $85 osPID which is just a general-purpose PID unit which could be attached to anything, like say your existing coffee maker.

But this got me thinking about open source hardware – how does the pressure part of an espresso machine work?

ShaColby helped me through the anatomy:

• grind coffee with burrs
• the time of grind would determine the amount of beans ground, since it’s a hopper above.
• there may be a secondary hopper for the ground coffee – this determines the amount used in the brew
• one school of thought has it that ground coffee can sit without ill effects – obviously this is not the policy of e.g. Blue Bottle – they require something like “under 5 minutes sitting”
• grounds moved into the press
• grounds are tamped – this presses the grounds into a “puck”.  The higher pressure the tamp, the greater the density the grounds.
• less density = faster water flow = weak coffee, not enough flavor from oils.
• greater density = slower water flow = stronger, bitter, acidic coffee.
• too dense – it will just be mud, and water won’t get through
• Note: Aeropress was designed about this
• ideally you want a finer grind (more surface area) with a less pressure tamp ?
• water enters the head – it is pressurized.
• It filters through… how long does it take?

Some links on anatomy and “mods”:

• Make Magazine v.04 (.pdf): add a PID controller to your espresso machine (now a lot easier thanks to projects like the osPID)
• Make Magazine v.12 (.pdf): hydraulic espresso tamper
• Espresso – A Three-Step Preparation
• Anatomy: the group head
• Anatomy: cutaway views of the La San Marco
• this guy in Hong Kong built something from scratch
• Sorta notable but not really: forum postings in instructables and barista exchange – I’m not sure if anything ever came of these
• preheating incoming water mod
• Burr grinder:
  • burr notes at toomuchcofee.com
  • Burr example 1 with diagram
  • Burr example 2
  • Burr example 3
  • Burr example 4
• General espresso quality notes:
  • crema guide at sweet marias.com

From Make Magazine and other mods we can see that a desirable thing to control with a micro controller is the water temperature. What else could we determine?

• grounds size – burrs are settable.  You’d set the spacing – No sensors needed?
• bean quantity used per cup
• tamping pressure (as in Make v.12)
• …which determines ground density.  Measure both for more accuracy.
• water volume
• water pressure – up to 14 bar?!
• water temperature (as in Make v.04)
• measure: time at pressure.
• estimation before brew
• Display what did happen

‎”Dogville” sure is a lot of whimpering!

My question is:

1. Did this have to be 3 hours long?
2. Nicole Kidman as Jesus?!

My review:

A Brechtian telling of a theater-pretentious “Last Temptation of Christ” by way of “They Call Her One Eye,” if Jesus was a slutty mob heiress.

At least I finished it, which is more than I can say for “Dancer In The Dark“…  it felt really similar.

Maybe Lars von Trier is not for me?  Should I attempt Manderlay?!

BRAIN: watching a steady stream of edutainment about the Neolithic
VINEET: iowa?

Maybe my obsession was related to the Republican caucuses — after all, these documentaries are about human progress.

The one I liked best was “Stories from the Stone Age,” an Australian production which follows the birth of agriculture through the beginning of the copper age.

More Paleolithic but good was “Ice World,” which was American and therefore shorter and less informative but more dramatic.

Village Voice had a piece about the Gräpple, which is funny because they aren’t exactly new.

When the grapples first appeared a few years ago I thought there might be more flavors on the way… not yet though!

I speculate what happened was: it’s about 5+ years ago, and apples are tending to taste the same. With lame apples, what if we dress them up a bit and make them grape flavored? The Grapple is born.

But in the next few years, the heirloom apple industry takes off. Now there is more taste and more apple variety. The demand for a different-flavored apple is met without injecting weird juice into them. Thus, the Grapple remains a novelty.

What do you think?

All of this is typical girl-fear. Once you realize that The Exorcist is, essentially, the story of a 12-year-old who starts cussing, masturbating, and disobeying her mother—in other words, going through puberty—it becomes apparent to the feminist-minded viewer why two adult men are called in to slap her around for much of the third act. People are convinced that something spooky is going on with girls; that, once they reach a certain age, they lose their adorable innocence and start tapping into something powerful and forbidden. Little girls are sugar and spice, but women are just plain scary. And the moment a girl becomes a woman is the moment you fear her most.

Watching The Exorcist now, and I have to regretfully conclude this reading is a bit of a stretch, which is a bummer because it’s really entertaining. The 12 year old Regan “masturbates” by stabbing her vagina with a crucifix, she “disobeys her mother” by peeing on the floor. This is a kind of liberation that is not very desirable!

A much stronger theme is the modern secular American culture is ultimately unfulfilling, leaving the upper-middle class characters feeling out of control of their children and their own destiny. They look for salvation and faith mainly in Christianity, but also other cultures (the priest is an immigrant, the demon is Pazuzu).

Interesting trivia: back at the school or whatever, there’s a banner in Latin letters that says “TASKUKETE!” – which is Japanese for “Help!” (“助けて!”)
Arguably: the deleted spider-walk scene inverts the little girl’s top and bottom, and she drools blood from her mouth, which could be interpreted as a perverted menstruation… however, again, not very desirable for would-be liberated women! Yuck.

every episode ends with Ivan Dobsky killing someone
sometimes to get back into jail
so the story elements are
open on the jail
he’s being released
Mr Jennings describes all his posessions
Ivan says the horrible thing they did to him to get a confession
Ivan is on Mr Hoppy
Ivan talks to 3 people trying to buy things that no longer exist
sometimes one of them rips him off
then Ivan meets someone who will be his victim
then Ivan ends up back at jail
finis!

ZACH: Nice

I got to hang out with custom jewelry designer David Thorp. He had made sour apple-flavored marshmallows for his guests!

David showed us some new pieces he had, including a couple crazy gold rings with wood on the inside – a “secret” for the bride and groom alone.

Another recent technological development that means engineering has caught up with my visions from high school: the soft robot which comes from George M. Whitesides’ lab at Harvard.

UPDATE: Reading their paper and watching the video, their lab

• printed a master mold in ABS using a 3D printer
• then cast in “EcoFlex” (from Smooth-On). A vacuum chamber is used to pull bubbles out of the EcoFlex before it is poured into the mold.
• The non-expanding backing is a different material.

links:

• paper in PNAS (supplements)
• fabrication video
• From 2010, Harvard student Carina Fish fabricates a tentacle from the EcoFlex, shows operation of a tentacle, operation of a “Hand” with knuckles… video embedding disabled!
• IEEE Spectrum video
• paper about “pneunets” – “Soft Robotics for Chemists”
• Pneumatic Artificial Muscles: actuators for robotics and automation about “McKibben-type actuators

However, after reading up on new techniques with 3D printing, I bet one could get similar results printing directly in the silicone goo! I know some have tried printing in caulking, for example with the Frostruder. Note caulking would probably be too stiff for this application… but maybe could be used as a flexible tube, or the less-flexible side? In a two-goo printer maybe?

See also:

• New Soft Robots Use Electropermanent (EP) Magnet Valves and Hydrogen Peroxide “Pneumatic Battery”
• IRobot Unveils Compliant “Jamming” End Effector (Robot Hand)
• DARPA “chembot” (DARPA page)
• jumping hoop and sphere robots from Japan
• Springer: “Review of manufacturing processes for soft biomimetic robots” in International Journal of Precision Engineering and Manufacturing Volume 10, Number 3, 171-181