insects and Coffee

Got the IC I ordered from Australia tonight. I was so excited about
this I almost drove back to the LAB at work to install it in my
TimerMod that Is conected to the MDL grinder.

Alas I did not.

Tomorrow tho… I’ll have the MDL dialed in to the one-tenth of a
second. So sweet!

Oh! And yes, I am sending this post from my iPod via wifi email (got
a new iPod Touch this last weekend, hacked it with JailBreak, added a
bunch of applications one of which is email… So Sweet… Such a Geek).

elvin iPod message

Yes! The digital timer Mod works great. But… turns out, just as I had suspected, I need a tighter grip on the delay. The MDL grinds 16.5 grams of coffee in 2 seconds, and 23.3 in 3 seconds. And so, looks as tho I do really need to order the new IC for my circuit board.

Then, maybe I’ll rip in to the MDL or maybe take the Timer over to the Dancing Goats Espresso Bar and install it in the ROBUR (with the ROBUR I’ll have to bypass the switch, it has a starter mechanism in there that I am not familiar with yet—have not ripped a ROBUR switch apart yet).

Meanwhile, got a message from Roberto at NUOVA, he has a different Timing mechanism in his warehouse that may meet my needs with the MDL.

Here is what the current Timer MOD and box looks like (the external model that is, if I keep it as an external type I’ll have to trick it out in some retro-futuristic style) >>>

<<<

Not very pretty, but hey, it works!

The most obvious is this web site, if you’ve been check’n it out in the past few days. I’ve been trying to tweak the CSS, not much luck yet. WordPress has so many little files and I’ve yet to figure out which ids and classes go to what, and how.

On to good things, I have not gotten the go ahead quite yet to rip in to and install a digital timer Mod on Nuova’s MDL (the grinder in on loan from them), and so I’ve made this external timer Modual that I can plug the MDL in to, or any thing for that matter.

I’ll be trying this out tomorrow, in spite of not having my newly programmed IC yet. The IC in my timer Mod has 1 second delays, I want 0.1 second delays (more control). I need to order the part from the original programmer… and well… he lives in Australia. It is going to take a little time. Maybe I’ll have it when I get back from Mexico. Yep!Heading to Mexico for a week, out of the dark wet Northwest for a bit.

We’ll, i’ve moved things to a new host… and so, starting over with the blog.

Going to jump straight into things and if i find any thing from the old site that may be interesting i’ll try and move it over into the archives at some point.

On to the exciting things!

I just got a new grinder from the folks at NUOVA Simonelli, the MDL… at first I thought that it might be too much of a machine for me to handle: on, off and that is it — 19 grams in 3-4 seconds, or there abouts.

The first stumbling block with this grinder was all the coffee spraying out into the dosing chamber leaving all the fine particulate stuck to the sides of the chamber, every once in awhile dropping to the bottom effectively changing up the grind on me. With NUOVA’s MDM the same thing happens. This is easily fixed on the MDM by holding your fingers in front of the throat of the grinder until the it clogs up and starts dropping the grounds straight down in to the doser. This was not the case with the faster MDL. With the MDL this clog would blow out very quickly. I messed around with a lot of ideas and finally came up with this…

I modified the throat of the grinder with this bit of plastic (from a milk jug) to stop the coffee from spraying out of the burrs, now the coffee drops straight down; no more static, no more spray.

Hands down my new favorite grinder.

Fast. Very fast. Too fast. I am now working on installing a digital timer.

—elvin