[SGVHAK] Adventures in cacao and cardboard (Was Re: Tux-Lab open work session on Saturday afternoon, 1/17

[Lan Dang]

These open work sessions at Tux-Lab are quite fun because you just come for as long as you like and you work on whatever you want in the company of other people who like to tinker.  HAK is not just about tinkering with electronics and hardware.  It's about making things and experimenting. 

We roasted coffee and cacao beans.  We used the Hot Top coffee roaster.  8 oz of cacao beans yield 6.4 oz of roasted cacao nibs,  which is a pretty good yield. 

Cacao nibs are sold at health food stores for about $13 per pound. A pound of cacao beans is about $5 from Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles.  There are various applications for cacao nibs aside from the obvious one of making chocolate. 

We decided to try making cocoa tea,  which required grinding the nibs to a coarse powder. This required three passes with a burr grinder. When we got to a fine grind,  things started clogging up due to moisture and oils in the nibs.  We discussed the difficulty of grinding cacao finely enough to make a smooth chocolate.  You can't get it done with a coffee grinder.  Maybe a flour mill. Or a rock tumbler using stainless steel balls? 

We tried to brew it like coffee using both a drip filter and a vacuum pot. we also tried putting it in a tea bag and steeping it.  we also tried making a hot chocolate mix by adding two spoonfuls of ground cocoa to two spoonfuls of sugar to about 4 oz of hot water and a dash of cream. It was pretty good in all its incarnation,  though you ended up chewing on the grounds with the last method. 

Other things people worked on were circuit boards,  arduinos,  and web application.  I learned how to use my Singer sewing machine.  We broke down a cardboard box that used to hold paper and used it to laser cut two sets of Google Cardboard vr goggles.  The template requires a minimum cardboard size of 9 in X 22 in. It needs some adjusting to account for eyeglasses and phone cases. It would be nice if we could programmatically change the cardboard template depending on head and phone measurements.  It may also need a little adjustment if the material is of a different thickness.  It worked okay for our cardboard,  which had a thickness of 0.13in. 

Since we were playing with cardboard,  we thought it might be cool to figure out other things we could laser cut and fold.  Or maybe we could laser cut a jigsaw puzzle. 

Lan

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