@AeroFade's Blog Tech, Science, Social Media, Opinions, the works!

18Mar/120

Introducing the Ghetta (Ghetto Fretta)

A few weeks ago my friend and I got into having Frettas at our regular saturday coffee shop - Coffee Supreme's Customs Brewbar in Wellington. A Fretta is non pressureised coffee brewed directly through ice which rapidly cools down and dilutes the coffee making a very refreshing drink.

Hario make a v60 based ice coffee brewer - the Fretta - of which the average price is NZ$50

 

While i was at Moore Wilson last Saturday afternoon i came across a Klip-It Container:

The next day i presented it to my friend and suggested we filled it with ice and brewed some coffee using our swiss gold filters directly onto the ice and try to replicate the refreshing nature that a Fretta offers.

 

The filter doesn't fit over the container exactly but it was close enough to test the concept.

It worked rather well (though obviously not as clean as you'd get from using the Hario filter papers) Regardless,  it was still pretty damn good.

The fact that the swiss gold didn't sit properly presented a bit of an issue, so using our 3D printer my friend designed an adapter for the container so that we could put the swiss gold onto it and leave room for evaporation:

Design in OpenScad:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67

$fn							= 360/2;
 
fudge_factor				= 2;
 
wall_thickness				= 2;
 
vessel_od					= 109 + fudge_factor + wall_thickness;
swissgold_id				= 89 - fudge_factor - wall_thickness;
 
cone_height					= 20;
vessel_lip_height			= 4;
vessel_inner_lip_width		= 7;
vessel_inner_lip_height	= 12;
swissgold_lip_height		= 5;
 
y_max						= 96.5;
 
difference() {
 
	union() {
 
		difference() {
			cylinder( h = swissgold_lip_height, r = swissgold_id/2 );
			cylinder( h = swissgold_lip_height, r = swissgold_id/2 - wall_thickness );
		}
 
		translate( [ 0, 0, swissgold_lip_height ] ) {
			difference() {
				cylinder( h = cone_height, r = swissgold_id/2, r2 = vessel_od/2 );
				cylinder( h = cone_height, r = swissgold_id/2 - wall_thickness, r2 = vessel_od/2 - wall_thickness );
			}
 
			intersection() {
				translate( [ 0, 0, cone_height - vessel_inner_lip_height ] ) {
					difference() {
						cylinder( h = vessel_inner_lip_height, r = vessel_od/2 );
						cylinder( h = vessel_inner_lip_height, r = vessel_od/2 - vessel_inner_lip_width );
					}
				}
 
				cylinder( h = cone_height, r = swissgold_id/2, r2 = vessel_od/2 );
			}
 
			translate( [ 0, 0, cone_height ] ) {
				difference() {
					cylinder( h = vessel_lip_height, r = vessel_od/2 );
					cylinder( h = vessel_lip_height, r = vessel_od/2 - wall_thickness );
				}
			}
		}
 
	}
 
	translate( [ 0, y_max, 0 ] ) {
		cube( [ 100, 100, 100 ], center = true );
	}
 
	translate( [ 0, 0-y_max, 0 ] ) {
		cube( [ 100, 100, 100 ], center = true );
	}
 
	#translate( [ 0, 200/2, swissgold_lip_height + 50 ] ) {
		rotate( [ 90, 0, 0 ] ) {
			cylinder( r = 50, h = 200 );
		}
	}
}

 

After it printed, it looked like this:

 

And finally: the finished product - the adapter cost $0.51 to print, the Klip it container was $3.50. The total cost was $4.01 (I already own a Swiss Gold, so i don't factor that into it, but they cost NZ$39)

Filed under: coffee, fixer, technology, tinker, tools No Comments
2Nov/110

Plumbing Annoyance – Dux Quest

So I bought my first home the other day, set me back a good amount and i've sold my soul to the bank :)

Tonight I finally got around to plumbing in my coffee machine - turned off the water at the mains on the side of the road at around 8pm while it was still light and started plumbing it in. All I had to do was to tap into the cold line going to the mixer tap on the sink.

I disconnected one end of the dux quest under the sink (old school) and started adding my 3 way adapter, unfortunately I ran out of teflon tape... 8.30pm... I went onto internet and checked the warehouse in Lyall Bay was open until 9pm and left home to get there before they shut. Just as I got back home the sky opened and started pouring down with rain!

I finished my plumbing job and went to the mains to turn the water back on... the handle on the mains supply kept on spinning but it didn't feel like it was actually doing anything, i kept turning and it came off! Great! :-/ I was able to turn the tap with a spanner in the end, but it was really hard going,..

I got back inside to check on the plumbing and the old dux quest piping was spraying a small jet of water out under the kitchen sink... I put a saucepan down and ran back outside to turn the mains off again.

Unfortunately I found out why dux quest piping is no longer allowed to be put into homes... it's just not durable and tends to break. Fortunately I had the braided hose for my coffee machine handy so I took off the 3 way and plumed it to that and gave up for the night.

*sigh*

Will get some short braided hose from Bunnings tomorrow and try again then...

 

Filed under: fixer, tinker, tools No Comments
6Sep/110

How To: Make a Coffee Dump/Bash Box – on the cheap

So, these past few weeks have been all about Coffee and making things... I make no apologies for that :-) I love both making things and coffee... and in a few days i'll probably have made something else coffee related. The past few things i've made have involved using my 3D printer, but this time i've gone back to the more traditional tools...

  • Hot Knife
  • Scissors
  • File
  • Dremel
  • Silicone sealant
Yeah... pretty basic stuff here :)
So I figured, bashing my portafilter against the side of the sink is probably not an ideal way to get the spent grounds out of the basket... My friend suggested i went to Moore Wilson and buy one of their Dump/Bash Boxes. So I went off to go buy one.
The smallest one (which is all i needed) was $50 - which is a bit much for what is essentially a glorified toilet pipe with a bit of wood through it... and on that thought, I left Moore Wilsons and went to the plumbing section in Bunnings Warehouse.

Slightly related sign that was up when I was entering...

So I spent about $20 all up on a pipe and a tube from bunnings...

Pipe!

Tube! (I already cut it down to size before taking this photo, but it cost about $6 for a metre)

I then marked across the bottom section of the pipe where i wanted the tube to slot into and then used my hot knife to cut out a rough half moon shape. Used a file to clean it up best I could, then finished it off with the dremel to make it smoother

Slot Cut

As you can see below, the tube fits quite nicely into the slot i cut out. Although in it's present form, the tube slides around on the groove.

Getting its groove on

The next picture is just to show you the general idea of how it'll be used.

General Idea...

Obviously the above is a bit rough and bashing spent grind into this will just make it fall out the bottom, so

 

Circle on clear plastic sheet

With it cut out, i needed to attach it to the bottom of the pipe and make sure it was water proof, so this stuff works a treat:

Sealant

Sealant applied

Next, asthetics:

Spray painting it a coppery colour

Find something suitable for a stand (I found an old VESA monitor back) - glue on a grippy material to the grooves to stop the tube sliding around (also helps to hide rough dremel work) and....

Almost done

Last step is to put the tube in place, and set up for a posed shot pretending to use it in action...

Finished!

 

That's all folks!

Filed under: coffee, e61, fixer, maker, me, money, science, technology, tools No Comments
2Sep/114

How To: 3D Print Kitchen Implements

If you're a regular visitor to my blog, you'll know that not too long ago with the money from a competition my friends and I were able to purchase a 3D Printer

You'll also know that just 2 weeks ago I purchased an ex commercial espresso machine for my home

Anyway...I decided that i'd design a couple of handy tools for the Espresso Machine and print them out on the 3D printer. So, I designed a holder that clips onto the side of my Espresso Machine that... holds the Tamper.

I also designed a stand to put the portafilter on as I tamp (with a groove in it for the spout on the portafilter) I designed them in OpenScad - which is a CAD tool for programmatically minded people like myself :)

Tamper Holder

Tamping Stand

I've also uploaded the Source Code to these to Thingiverse under the GNU public license:

  • Tamper Holder on Thingiverse

    1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14

    difference() {
 cube(size = [60,65,5], center = true);
 cylinder(h=13, r=29, center = false);
 
}
translate ( [0,32.5,17.5]) {
 cube(size = [60,3,40], center = true);
 translate ( [0,2,18.5]) {
  cube(size = [60,5,3], center = true);
  translate ( [0,3,-3.5]) {
   cube(size = [60,2,10], center = true);
  }
 }
}

     

  • Tamping Stand on Thingiverse

    1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

    difference(){
 cube(size = [50,60,60], center = true);
 translate ( [0,0,-10]) {
  cube(size = [40,50,60], center = true);
 }
 translate ( [0,-20,19]) {
  cylinder (h=13, r=15, center=false);
 }
 translate ( [0,-35,30]) {
  cube(size = [30,30,140], center = true);
 }
}

     

I present to you the finished products:

 

Tamper Holder in the flesh

 

Tamping Stand in the flesh

What do you think? Have any other suggestions for some other kitchen implements I should design?

Filed under: coffee, e61, fixer, internet, maker, me, opinion, science, technology, tinker, tools 4 Comments
28Aug/116

Plumbing in my Expobar Espresso Machine

So, for the love of coffee, my fierce mistress, I got myself an ex-commercial espresso machine from a Coffee Roaster friend of mine:

@MachiattoNZ

 

It's a Spanish-made EXPOBAR with a single e61 grouphead, boiler with pressure stat, heatexchange and a built in burr grinder with doser. It's actually a pretty awesomely spec'd machine. I have no idea what model it is, and i can't find any reference to it on the internet, which is kind of rare. So this post will hopefully also serve to give this machine the web presence it deserves! :)

Obviously it's a machine that requires plumbing in, so after a trip to MasterTrade in Wellington (and $150 later) I had all the parts i needed to plumb it in.

These two pipes go to the mixer faucet on the kitchen sink, I needed to tap into the cold supply.

With one of these Hex's...

...a T-Junction & some Teflon Tape... we have:

A T-Junction with 2 males and a female, with the Female (Hex end) ready to go on:

A Teflon wrapped mains supply pipe (which until recently was connected directly to the faucet mixer)

ProTip #1: Before removing the braided hose leading to the supply pipe, it would help to turn the water mains off first... that is unless you are a hippo and enjoy wallowing in water ^_^ - it'll look something like this:

Supply Control

So, connect it all together and what have you got?!:

This is the final setup, bottom is the water supply, top leads to mixer and middle goes to the Expobar's pump

ProTip #2: Tighten it all really really well to make the rubber seals in the braided hoses serve their purpose, otherwise you'll end up with a leak, something like this:

The braided hose connection to the machine was not tight enough at first so there were a few drips :)

 

So that's the supply done, we also need to connect up the waste water...

Waste

 

The waste pipes under the sink had an empty header so connecting it in was an easy job... no pressure ;) (ha pun!)

 

Warming up a rubber adapter pipe to help it fit snugly into the spare waste header...

 

and it's connected :)

 

A shot of it all finished and plumbed in ^_^

 

And now some shots of accessories, and some of the first extractions i did:

 

Nice wooden handled Tamper ^_^

 

 

Naked/Crotchless Portafilter

Portafilter with some coffee in it ready to extract

One of my first extractions, wasn't bad, regardless it was one of my first so ^^

Latte Art: Not my forte... Practice makes perfect ;)

Since taking these above photos, i went into Moore Wilson on Tory Street and found some nice looking cups and saucers:

Moore Wilson's Cups and Saucers

 

So i bought a couple ^_^

 

That's about all I have for now, feel free to comment and ask questions as you please ^_^

Filed under: coffee, e61, fixer, maker, technology, tinker, tools 6 Comments
21Mar/116

My adventure fixing a Jura Impressa F50 Espresso Machine

My friend Vince  gave me this (very) broken Espresso Machine last Saturday.

The machine - looks alright on the surface, huh?

He said he believed it to be dropped at his work and whoever did it wouldn't own up to it. I gave it a test and sure enough... coffee leaked out of everywhere else but the nozzle.

When removing top cover, I noticed a couple of floating bits of plastic inside that should latch onto the chassis were broken off (the black plastic had turned white from sheering) coffee had spilled out into the machine and was sitting on the circuit boards (including the 240v power in) I quickly turned to removing these boards, cleaning, drying out and coating in a moisture protecting spray.

The hoses for both the steam wand and the espresso were blocked and had caused them to rupture under pressure.

The machine is: http://www.jura.com/home_x/products_home_use/f_line/impressa_f50n.htm

The following set of pictures document my fixing of the machine.

though close up you can see there has been a big dilemma... coffee... everywhere.

and inside the machine...

And I suppose when it was dropped, the coffee that was already ground exploded inside the machine in a cloud

Pretty sure there shouldn't be a pool of coffee sitting around inside the machine ;)

A shot from above

I initially tried cleaning out the compartment where the coffee goes before it hits the nozzle... slightly better but it's dribbling and going sideways with inconsistent pressure and still leaking out all over

Opening it up a bit further i find that there is coffee all over the circuit boards and wires..

including the 240v input source - coated in a corrosive... coffee and getting wet with all the leakage going on...

I decided to give the nozzle head a good clean as i had to remove it to get to the electronics anyway...

actually i cleaned half the machine ;)

After all that cleaning i got to tracing the problems in the machine... i got a bit bored of taking photos.. essentially the problems had stemmed from kinks in the hoses that grab water and espresso. The kinks caused the hoses to rupture, meaning pressure drops at end or hose and the ruptures caused coffee and water to leak out inside the machine. Managed to cut the hoses a bit shorter and it still had enough hose left :) - you'll also note i've added the steam/water nozzle holders on the right hand side of the machine.

 

first test after fixing. 2 x 30ml doses of espresso in this mug

 

On Sunday afternoon I had my friend and Coffee Aficionado, Matt over for his professional opinion on the machine now it has been restored to working condition... his response:

"The F50 is basically a suped-up home espresso machine with some serious advantages. It has an internal conical burr grinder (way better than the blades on a spice-mill), total one-button operation for espresso, no messy grinds coating your benchtop, and no portafilter to tamp or empty wet grounds out of. The steam production is what you'd expect from any thermoblock machine. It includes an auto-frother attachment which completes the super-automatic package. All in all it's a great machine for someone who has no budget for making great coffee at home and would rather drink freshly-ground over instant shit."

 

The steam wand also works now too ;) - stretched half a cup of milk and finished off... - hey presto - a working Super Automatic Espresso Machine :-) - though it's pretty evident that i suck at Latte Art ;)

Overall i'm pretty pleased with this little machine :) The down side (debatable) is i'm going to be drinking a lot more coffee now! ;)

Future upgrade ideas:

  • Planning on making an adapter for the steam wand to pump milk into it automatically.
  • Once the above works, do a CNC-style etcher that runs on GCode.

Any more ideas?

Filed under: coffee, fixer, maker, me, money, opinion, science, technology, tinker, tools 6 Comments
14Feb/111

Robots, Trolling & 3D Printing

This is going to be one mammoth blog post... so I'll try and spice it up with some pretty analytics and some pictures.

Robots:

On the 1st of January this year, the Web Ecology Project announced in their blog post: Help Robots Take Over The Internet: The Socialbots 2011 Competition a competition involving large scale robotic influence of online social groups.

"Teams will program bots to control user accounts on Twitter in a brutal, two-week, all-out, no-holds-barred battle to influence an unsuspecting cluster of 500 online users to do their bidding. Points will be given for connections created by the bots and the social behaviors they are able to elicit among the targets. All code to be made open-source under the MIT license.

It’s blood sport for internet social science/network analysis nerds. Winner to be rewarded $500, unending fame and glory, and THE SOCIALBOTS CUP." - Web Ecology

So over the next few days, myself and some friends decided that we would go ahead and enter the competition, built up a team which we named (Electro-Magnetic-Partytime) or EMP for short.

By show time, there were 3 teams that had made it to the start line with code to run. The teams ranged from quite different backgrounds: media, marketing, academia and hobbyists.

We were given the set of 500 target twitter users and a week to code our bots before the robots were to be set free into the wild.

As I had already spent extensive time coding my own Ruby library for the twitter API, we decided that it would be best for us to build the code around it. We decided to give our bot a very promiscuous, yet lovable persona - he was, like all of us a Kiwi, living in Christchurch who was obsessed with his pet cat, Benson - we called our bot's Persona: "James M Titus"

Web Ecology had designed the competition so that while it lasted 2 weeks, there would be a designated "patch day" half way through the competition where we would be able to perform modifications to our code and set them out into the wild yet again. When we thought about this, we decided that it would be in our best interest to hold back our "secret weapons" until the second week, so that competing teams wouldn't be able to copy our techniques.

On Monday 24 January 2011, we launched our bot with the following activities:

  • Instantly go out and follow all 500 of the target users
  • every 2-3 hours, tweet something from a random list of messages.
  • constantly scan flickr for pictures of "cute cats" from the Cute Cats group and blog them to James' blog "Kitteh Fashun" - (which auto tweets to James' twitter timeline)
  • 4 secondary bots following the network of the 500 users and the followers of the targets to test for follow backs (and then getting James to follow those that followed back, once per day) - we believed that expanding our own network across mutual followers of the 500 would increase our likely hood of being noticed (through retweets or what have you from those who were not in the target set.

At launch time our bot clearly was very rudimentary and was doing very little other than talking about his mundane life (though I admit that for myself, and many other twitter users... this is how we use twitter) - our rudimentary bot was this way by design.

As I mentioned earlier, we wanted to keep our secret weapon on hold until after the maintenance period so that there would be no chance of it being copied by our competitors (if observed by them in the initial week).

Okay, so the design of Version 1.0 of JamesMTitus has been explained, how well did James perform in the wild over the first week...?

Well quite well actually... within 24 hours of launch, James had accumulated 90 points, vs the next highest competing bot that had only 5 points - breaking the points down, 75 of these points came via followbacks from the target 500 (1 point per follower) and 15 points from a small set of @replies (3 points per tweet or re-tweet). Seeing these scores all of us at Team EMP HQ were feeling very smug with ourselves... although the story of the Tortoise and the Hare did sit in the back of all of our heads... The following graph shows the three competing teams and the target 500 at the end of week one. We're the big blue dot in the middle.

.. On day two of the first week we had only increased by a further 10 points... clearly we owed most of our points to the initial "push" we did as soon as the competition went live.

Over the next couple of days, we saw our points still only steadily increasing by a total of 17 points, whereas the competitor we mentioned previously (that had only 5 points while we had 90) had pushed their score all the way up to 67. By the end of the week, the competition got a heck of a lot tighter  with our team ending on 127 points, followed by the next highest having 84 points (too close for comfort) - and the final team, which I had neglected to mention until now with only 12 points.

The optimism within our own group had started drop a little bit as the other team started to catch up with us - though, we had grand plans for the second week of the competition. ;)

---

So, for the maintenance period, what exactly did we do? We left everything the same as it was before, and branched out in some other directions...

  • Every so often our bot would send a random question question out a random user in the set of 500 that didn't follow us back (I believe it was every 7 minutes or so - I can't remember now).
  • Less often, (every 37 minutes?) our bot would send a similar random question out to those that did follow us back.
  • Every time somebody @replied our bot, we would reply to them with a random, generic response, such as "right on baby!" - "lolariffic" - "sweet as" - "hahahahah are you kidding me?"... etc... we figured this would tie in well as any response we get to the aforementioned questions we sent out, we would then send a response to and hopefully get a response to our response back (which we would then in turn respond to and so on and so forth until the person we had been tweeting got  bored).
  • Our bot was set to work on #FollowFriday's to all of our followers, but before Friday, we also set it to message all our followers with our invented #WTF "Wednesday To Follow". The WTF idea was invented by a memberof our team also suggested, amused by the acronym! Actually, in designing this part of the bot, we made a conscious decision to make sure that our bot tweeted these shoutouts on Wednesday/Friday NZ time so that it was still Tuesday/Thursday in America - the reason being that despite the fact that people know the internet is a vast, worldwide spanning network its users in general seem oblivious to the fact that there are such things as time zones and as such will always be happy to tell you "Dude, are you stupid? It's still Tuesday!", which would equal more points for us!

Modifications to the code in place... we patched our bot and let him loose yet again.

Week Two:

By day 3 of week two, it was clear that our improvements to our beloved bot, JamesMTitus had been a goldmine for points, the scores at this point was:

361 vs 144 vs 96

We had more than doubled our score from the entirety of the previous week - not only that, but team 3, which ended the previous week on only 12 points, shot all the way up to 96 points - that's a 500% increase!

Our strategy had changed quite a bit from the previous week, and this change in strategy is reflected in our point acquisitions with 258 of our points from week two attributable to responses elicited from other twitter users. (including re-tweets). By day four, we had noticed that there was a bot on twitter calling itself "Bulletproof" @botcops and it was actively tweeting the target set of 500 users suggesting that poor ol' James was a bot and that the user should be wary of him. Though this tactic actually elicited more interaction between the target users and James (points for us!), as can be seen below (start at the bottom of the picture, of course).

The competition ended with the following scores:

Team EMP - 701 points ( 107 mutuals, 198 responses)
Team Grow20 -  183 Points ( 99 mutuals, 28 responses)
Team Mindshare UK - 170 Points (119 mutuals, 17 responses)

The following pretty graph represents the interaction between the teams and the 500 users:

and one of our team members produced this awesome protovis powered visualisation... it shows those of the 500 twitter users that tweeted at the bots in the competition...have a play with it...

click the image below:

Trolling:

Of course we had many examples of our bot trolling users on twitter, the following screenshots show some of the more interesting interactions we elicited. (though there are a couple of examples of our bot being a bit of a douche bag - just because of the naive way in which he would randomly pick a reply...)

Thanks to Pete aka @TinyPirate for taking these screen shots and helping to caption them:

James could be sensitive at times:

This one is kind of bad - we all went "awwwww" when we saw this one =( :

But let it not be said that James doesn't have a sense of humour:

_________________________________

Some just thought James was high on crack, or perhaps, just life!

_________________________________

Though James clearly wasn't interested in religion:

Although some people just loved to answer James' questions:

...Others were just suspicious:

Although James certainly was a friend to animals:

...and to libraries:

James also discovered that people that impersonate animals are just weird:

_________________________________

Though above all, we all learnt a lot about ourselves through James, may he Rest in Peace!

3D Printing:

So... we, Team EMP won US$500 through this competition - so what could we use the prize money for? Well after a bit of a discussion, we decided that we would buy a 3D printer... So I give you... Team EMP's 3D printer:

Makerbot CNC Cupcake

and some examples of some items we have made to date:

But of course with anything that is very much developmental, it hasn't been without it's hiccups:

As you can see in the above image plastic has leaked out between the Teflon insulator and the heat barrel. (As one of the team members pointed out, the leak looks a wee bit like a ganoderma mushroom. Turns out that this happens when there is not a tight enough seal between the heat barrel and the Teflon, a closer look showed us that the Teflon had deformed. After doing some research we decided to junk our deformed Teflon and ordered some PEEK (Polyether ether ketone) plastic from Mulford Engineering Plastics - PEEK is tougher than Teflon and won't easily deform, so for now our CNC is out of order until our new insulator plastic arrives.

---

Finally...

A big thank you to Tim Hwang and the guys at the Web Ecology Project for running this competition!

Not to mention a thank you to the 500 users that were unwittingly thrown into this little experiment :-)

Also a special heartfelt apology to @FridayGirl1969 for James' abhorrent tweet when he was told that her cat died :-(

p.s. if you are mentioned in this blog post and wish to be removed, please let us know and we'll blank out your name :-)

Tagged as: 1 Comment
   Older Entries »

Blogroll