The clock is on scale time, of course.

The scale Green building has Tetris playing on it. Today the real one did, too:

Falls under FUCK YEAH MIT.

Before the incredible heat wave that swept the east coast, I went up to Deer Isle where we tapped maple trees with the inestimable Dan Bouthot. Some details follow.

The phloem is the part of the stem that normally carries sugars around the tree, whereas the xylem carries water from the roots up. In between these two parts is the cambium, where the tree grows more phloem and xylem cells. However, when collecting maple sap, we are apparently collecting sugary water from the xylem, which is sending sugary water up to the canopy during freeze-thaw cycles throughout the course of an early spring day. I don’t really understand why there is sugar in the roots, even though I read this paper about sap flow. Maybe to prevent the roots freezing in the winter?

Dan uses little taps he made himself out of bamboo, with little notches for twist ties that hold up reused gallon jugs. You can also buy fancy premade ones though.

We tapped about 5 trees, and each tap produced about 2 gallons of sap a day. We picked it up around noon, and again in the evening. You have to boil the sap down around 15:1, depending on the conditions around the trees, to get maple syrup. We started to measure the sap content with a hydrometer, but then we broke it. Whoops.

This is my dad ^ collecting sap. Yup, this is a full team effort.

Jeff took it upon himself to chop the wood for the sap-boiling down fire. And with ‘took it upon himself’, I mean gleefully launched himself into a chopping frenzy the second we got to Dan’s. If you ever need someone to chop wood, drop him a line. He’d be delighted.

We had 2 pots going on our fire, one large pot, and one hotel pan for quick evaporation which we would refill from the big pot. Throughout the course of the boiling, we adjusted the fire pit a bit to maximize heat transfer, but it wasn’t exactly optimal. Next time perhaps no cinder blocks.

Since we were boiling with spruce wood as our fuel, the final maple syrup has a nice spruce smoke flavour. So nice, we decided to also barbecue some mussels we foraged earlier on the flames. The most delicious thing, smoky barbecued mussels. I’ll write another post about foraging mussels again sometime soon.

While boiling, Dan recommends skimming off any scum that forms on the surface. This is to maximize evaporation area, so that your boiling down goes quicker.

The last bit of boiling we did at home on the stove. You can monitor the boiling temperature of your syrup to determine when it is done (this is what big maple syrup houses do, I believe), or like us, you can watch its boiling behaviour to figure it out.

Here is syrup that is not yet ready boiling:

Once the syrup is ready, the surface starts to look oily and it starts to boil up, like milk does:

It’s important to watch the maple syrup during this last stage, or you might lose it all to the fire.

Then I strained the syrup through 8 layers of cheesecloth, and am keeping it refrigerated in a flip top bottle that previously contained pink lemonade. The cheese cloth was a pretty tasty semi-lollipop afterwards.

There are red maples near my apartment, I wonder if MIT will let me tap them next spring. It seems that they might be quite delicious as well, just not as sugar-rich.

A couple of years ago I wrote this handout for how to solder surface mount components, and since then I have lost it on my computer many times even though I wanted to give it to people. The obvious solution I should have thought about long ago is to upload it to the easy-to-find location of the internet. Dur.

Click the image if you want to see the full size/print it out.

Maybe it is the free fiesta max Jeff has been sharing?

I never realized how skinny those tails really are, hidden under the imposing fluff.

I, for some reason, waste a lot of time and energy growing herbs and vegetables in my 50m^2 apartment. Well, maybe the herbs are worth it– you never need much of them and some of them are quite hardy. But the daily watering, fertilizing, pruning, and tending of tomato and bean plants really doesn’t. It occupies all my south-facing windows, and part of the east and west facing ones. I worry about my plants when on trips. I pay people to take care of them. I have lamps and fans and a reserve of crushed egg shells. I read papers on gardening published by Cornell’s department of horticulture. I examine diseased leaves in my lab. I am kind of obsessed.

My plants enjoy first-class citizen status, and I am a lowly slave. I move them around to sunny spots in my apartment so they can leisurely bask in the warm rays. Here you can see Mr Tomato with Mr Lemon Basil and Mr Genovese Basil, next to Mr Yellow Wax Bean.

And, as the internet beckons us fringe lunatics to believe, I am not alone! There appears to be a whole army (and with that I mean at least 10 blogs) of people doing some kind of modern homesteading. Mostly they refer to a dissatisfaction with the federal government, oil disputes, climate change, factory farming, and other dismal and vague conditions otherwise affecting our happy, educated, placid, lower-upper-middle-class, as reasons for engaging in this otherwise odd behaviour. Soap-making. Candle-dipping. DIY hydroponics.

Although first-class citizens, sometimes I eat the plants’ babies.

Like other farmer’s market shoppers, I like weird crops that are strange colours so I can show off how SPECIAL I am.

However, I get annoyed at myself when I picture myself as part of this group of post-new-agers. Phrases like home-grown revolution, pioneering self-sufficiency, urban homesteading– to me they sound more like 21st century marketing targeted at the phantom nostalgia people like me feel for a time we’ve never experienced, except maybe when reading Little House on the Prairie. There are so many PRODUCTS aimed at this group. Plastic snap-together pails for ‘vertical farming’. ‘Reusable’ bags with birds and trees silkscreened onto them. Bicycles. Bicycle bags, bicycle clothing, bicycle lights, other bicycle accessories. Vacuum-packed fed-exed sourdough starter. How-to books. Everything on Etsy.

Hydroponics still rely on a weirdly sterile mix of liquid nutrients, which are mostly derived from petrochemicals. My ovens, fans, lamps, and mail-ordering– they are not efficient, effective, or ecological. The worst part seems to be that we all participate in marketing these things to each other. I want a canning set. I want a crop share. I want a recycled-poly jacket. I want to keep chickens. I want hand-spun yarn things. I want a food dehydrator.

I don’t need a flower pollinator though. I use a Q-tip taped to my electric toothbrush. I measured its vibrations to be around the same order of magnitude as a bee flapping its wings.

When Whole Foods tries to appeal to me by showing their authenticity, it works. Even though I am intensely skeptical of their supposed authenticity (is a major retail location really telling me they don’t care about their bottom line?) and the packaged way they show it (perhaps everything they sell is more local, more sustainable… but I can definitely tell it is prettier and better designed). It’s like the placebo effect. I know it’s not what I want it to be, but it still works.

So, my plants. They make me feel good. Kind of embarrassed, and annoyingly holier-than-thou, but good. I care about them, they need me. But all the nightshade varieties are dying from late blight. I brushed oil on them, pruned affected areas. Fanned them. But the disease is rampant, and I am letting all my tomato plants die, and will start over. Perhaps, as I learn, the yield in this small, procrastinating grad student apartment will increase to something that will justify my time a little more. Probably not, it probably will just continue to be a really cheap form of therapy.

THE BLIGHT! Oh, the horror. It has set in all the plants, young and old. It started with a small patch on a branch of the first plant, which I did not recognize at the time. But NOW! I KNOW the FACE of BLIGHT!

This is me, Arianna Huffington, Asha Jadeja, and Neil Gershenfeld, my advisor.

Davos is full of fancy famous people, but like the Streets song goes:

When you’re a famous boy, it gets really easy to get girls,
it’s all so easy you get a bit spoilt.
But, when you try to pull a girl, who is also famous too,
it feels just like when you wasn’t famous.

The truth is, the only people I met who I recognised off the bat were Tim Berners-Lee and Adele Santos, who are both at MIT, so I should know what they look like.

Juliana Rotich with Tshepiso Monaheng from the Fablab South Africa in Soshanguve and the Ushahidi Earrings we fabricated. Left picture by Noneck, who is now a former world traveller and WEF tech magistrate!

Beyond the sea of middle-aged-white-men-in-suits, there are some cool people that WEF invites as ‘YGLs’, or Young Global Leaders. This year, this included Juliana Rotich from Ushahidi (who is extremely thoughtful, articulate, and on the ball), and Eben Bayer, from Ecovative. Ushahidi develops open-source software for crisis mapping, and Ecovative develops materials where they use mycelium as replacement packaging material (Eben is who you should really be contacting with your packaging needs instead of MFG). Last year I was testing a block of Ecovative mycelium as a possibility for milling foam (as a mould for vacuum forming), and now maybe I will continue those tests. Oddly, Mick Jagger showed up at a YGL event too, but I suppose he is young at heart.

I originally tried to engage the WEF-goers with conversation about the implications of personal fabrication- manufacturing without an economy of scale, on demand design, cutting and pasting in 3d space… but when we really started getting traffic it was because we started fabricating coins, credit cards, paper bills, and um, fake WEF badges. No irony after all.

I as the federal reserve set the value of 100 Aleh to approximately 700k EUR. Unfortunately, no one wants to exchange my funds.

In 1762, Rousseau wrote in Émile, or On Education, that smell was the sense of the imagination; as it gives tone to the nerves it must have great effect on the brain. Little did Rousseau know that the olfactory nerve was the only cranial nerve besides the optic nerve that does not route through the brainstem.

He continues: Smells by themselves are weak sensations. They move the imagination more than the sense and effect us not so much by fulfilment as by expectation. Smell as a cue to a memory, which may draw whimsical or visceral responses.

An extremely sensitive reflex may result from these memories, at least in rats: apparently they can smell down to 0.04 ppt of 2,4,5-trimethylthiazoline, which happens to be an odorant exuded from the anal glands of cats and red foxes (Laska et al. 2005). Analytical instrumentation pales in comparison, only managing to detect odorants at ppb levels at best (with ideal sample presentation, slow analysis, and no masking odorants present).

Even now, smell experiments (e.g. for determining permissible odour levels around landfills) are often conducted with panels of experts instead of with instrumentation alone. (In fact, some legislation around smell is based on number of complaints reported, because detecting the smell levels directly is deemed too complicated/expensive.) TSA dogs are sniffing your bags for bombs or apples. But to be able to measure things like how long it takes to detect the smell or where the smell is stronger, people have been inventing funny machines at least since the early 19th century.

In 1895, Henrik Zwaardemaker, professor at Utrecht University, published Physiologie des Geruchs, a treatise on olfaction and odorants. In it, he details different methods of presenting odorants to subjects in a controlled fashion:

Zwaardemaker’s olfactometers, or Riechmesser. The second is an improvement upon the first, with an interchangable odorant chamber. From Physiologie des Geruchs.

A set up for measuring time taken to detect a smell? Not sure where the big pointy thing goes to… From Physiologie des Geruchs.

But the most funny man-chine is preserved for the present day! Might I share the NASAL RANGER™:

Look at how SCIENTIFIC these people look! They must be so AUGMENTED! These images are all lifted from a google image search for Nasal Ranger.

The Nasal Ranger™ does nothing more than provide some ratio of active carbon filtered and non-filtered air. So you can just smell the air, or just smell nothing, or something in between. You can decide if there is a big difference between filtered and not-filtered air. It’s not that fancy. Yet it evokes TECHNONOSE, or BETTER-THAN-YOURS nose. Here they even describe it as a “mobile artificial nose”, even though the nose part actually belongs to the person holding the retrofuturistic contraption (which apparently costs 1500 USD).

Another silly instrument, another day. Next thing you know, they’ll be measuring odorant levels in Degrees Brix.

addendum

Marco points out that the Nasal Ranger looks surprisingly similar to something already invented by Professor Farnsworth:

The SMELL-O-SCOPE! “The Smell-O-Scope allows the user to smell odours over astronomically long distances (”If a dog craps anywhere in the universe, you can bet I won’t be out of the loop”). The degree of odour can be measured on a meter called the “Funkometer”. It is unknown how the device functions, but it apparently has a lens and a stench coil.”

addendum ii
I wanted to include this excerpt too, to point out what a funny guy Dhr. Zwaardemaker was:

Teehee, Fäcalgestank.

Dan Barber is a chef and restaurant owner, operating the Blue Hill restaurant in NYC ($40 entrées, yowser), and to some extent it seems also the Blue Hill Farm in Great Barrington, MA. He’s apparently served Mrs. Obama as part of her campaign of better food and health (see this), and on his website claims he advises on some executive branch food and farming policy. He’s also oddly skinny for a chef.

He spend the first hour of his cooking lecture talking about dirt. No joke. He even drew a picture of a SUPERNEMATODE eating other nematodes (not super) on the blackboard, to illustrate the infinite possibilities of flavour production in the ecology of topsoil.

The main point he made with his ode to dirt was that without an entire ecology providing a variety building blocks (like flavonoids and flavonols?) for plants to grow from, the plants would grow flavourless and undesirable. If used to then feed animals, those animals would also grow up to flavourless and undesirable. While the development of synthetic fertilizers and the work done during the green revolution for increasing crop yields and thus preventing famine was utilitarian, Dan Barber claims that the green revolution was also the downfall of flavour. Subsequently, lack of flavour and overfarming high-yield soy, corn and wheat crops leads to our unhealthy relationship to food.

Now I shall pause the chef-talk for an interlude with Annemarie Mol, an amazing researcher/professor (hoogleraar, en haar oratie wordt op donderdag in de UvA aula gehouden) at the University of Amsterdam. Some of her previous research was focused on the social practices of healthcare, and now she is researching food and the body. She is the principle investigator of the research project ‘Eating bodies. The eating body in Western practice and theory‘, which encompasses four subcategories:
(1) the eating body’s health: limiting calorie intake versus maximising satisfaction;
(2) the eating body’s sensitivity: on tasting in various practices;
(3) the eating body and other eaters: on different ways of relating individual and collective;
(4) the eating body and its environment: on absorbing food, excreting waste and different bodily boundaries.

In Tasting Food: Tasting Between the Laboratory and the Clinic, Mol questions how the function of taste relates to the relevance of taste. In fact, whether researching the function of taste would lead us to understanding its relevance at all. Mol discovers that according to ‘taste scientists’ (observed on their now seeming defunct website tastescience.com) flavour is more than taste, and flavour can guide our eating bodies positively or negatively, thus helping us either enjoy the food or find out if it is poison. But where, asks Mol, can one find eating bodies (especially in the targeted Western regions) that are confronted with poisonous food? Especially often enough to be able to identify poisonous flavours? Mol suggests that much of the research that backs up these utilitarian findings on the function of flavour are based on laboratory experiments using models of human bodies– those models being rats. And indeed, that rats are astute test-tasters, but perhaps not so closely tied to common social practices of western eating bodies.

In the paper Good Taste: The embodied normativity of the citizen-consumer she contrasts citizens ’serving common good’ to consumers ’seeking pleasure’. Instead of taste being cultivated by bodily concerns such as avoiding disease or gaining enough nutrients, taste is now a construct of desire shaped by advertising and society. She proposes that instead of allowing the consumer-citizen to be shaped by the questionably developed notion of ‘bodily pleasure’, we acknowledge the shaping of taste and interfere with how it is currently done.

This brings me back to Dan Barber. His conclusion was that we must SEIZE flavour by developing and using new ‘modernist farming’ techniques. To some extent they may look back at pre-green revolution farming, but mostly we must understand how to harness science and technology to support a teeming topsoil and genetically diverse foodcrop. At the end of his ode to flavour (with dirt prelude) he points to the leadership of the gallant foodie in restoring the importance of flavour and its healthful side effects.

It is difficult for me to separate Dan Barber’s story from all this heritage-breed heirloom-crop (which is often conflated with the sustainable-green-local movement) whole-foods expensive feel-goodery, even though he explicitly rejected conforming to the-past-was-better food critics. Both Dan Barber and places like Whole Foods declare they will save the western world from its staggering obesity and diabetic problems. Because obviously, the citizen-consumer is responding to the flavours of these alternate foods, which similarly obviously correspond to their health benefits. The citizen-consumer is certainly NOT responding to newly effective marketing, and that marketing is certainly NOT forming the desire and enjoyability of the citizen-consumer’s eating body.

But perhaps at times the obvious doesn’t seem as obvious as we might like, and heirloom/heritage/local farmers may decide to turn to science to solidify their claims. Thus the second interlude, visiting some units Dan Barber mentioned during his lecture: degrees Brix.

In his lecture, Dan Barber mentions working with one of his farmers on organic carrots, and going outside one February and measuring 17 degrees Brix in one of the carrots farmed in Blue Hill. He explains that degrees Brix corresponds to the sugar content, and we’re looking at a carrot that 17% sugar. Ecstatic, he then takes an organic Mexican carrot he’s using for stocks from the kitchen fridge and measures 0 degrees Brix. Then he concludes that his methods for farming are vastly superior. Hm. Before we get into the assumptions and methods used in this experiment, let us examine what exactly this degrees Brix is:

Brix scale n [Adolf F. Brix 1870: a hydrometer scale for sugar solutions so graduated that its readings at a specified temperature represent percentages by weight of sugar in the solution [Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary]

So a hydrometer is a little thermometer-looking thing filled with something of known specific gravity that you float inside another cylinder containing your sample to measure its specific gravity. The line on the hydrometer that then is at the surface of the sample is read off. The reading that will follow is a ratio: you are comparing e.g. grams per ml to grams per ml.

Degrees Brix is one of the tables used to compare these ratios to ratios obtained using samples with certain amounts of dissolved solids. Brix is mostly used in the grape juice/wine making industry, specifically for measuring sucrose solutions. Other common tables include the Plato scale, used for brewing, and the Baumé scale, used in pharmacology. As far as I can tell, they all seem to be almost exactly the same.

Apparently, it is now much more common for viticulturers to measure degrees Brix in their grapes by using a refractometer, and there is some conversion scale that allows you to go from the index of refraction to the degrees Brix. A refractometer is easier to use, because you can just take a drop of liquid (in the field) and measure its index of refraction on the spot.

But what we learn from all this is that the degrees Brix measured are only going to correspond to the dissolved amounts of sucrose if there is nothing else in the sample that is affecting its specific gravity. And that’s probably never going to happen with a bunch of juices produced by random plants. Or other random liquids. But it turns out to correspond kind of to sweetness in grapes, supposedly because the dissolved solids in grape juice are apparently mostly sucrose, glucose and fructose. But I actually haven’t found any studies that empirically back this up using different analytical instrumentation. And that effect (of degrees Brix somehow corresponding to ‘goodness’) is readily multiplied in many other food science studies. Here are are two of the many examples:

An evaluation of Brix refractometry instruments for measurement of colostrum quality in dairy cattle, Bielmann et al., Journal of Dairy Science, Vol 93, Issue 8, August 2010:

[…indicating an appropriate cut-off point of 22% Brix score for the identification of good quality colostrum. …]

Read: we randomly find that the milk of cows that have just given birth is best if it measures to have 22% dissolved solids.

Use of the refractometer as a tool to monitor dietary formula concentration in gastric juice, Chang et al., Clinical Nutrition, Volume 21, Issue 6, December 2002, pgs 521-525:

[…We found that distilled water, minerals, and vitamins had low Brix values of 0±0, 1.2±0.1, and 0.4±0.1, respectively. On the other hand, because carbohydrate (17 g/100 ml), protein (5.3 g/100 ml), fat (4.1 g/100 ml), and full-strength polymeric diet had high concentrations of dissolved nutrients, they also had high Brix values (12.1±0.6, 6.5±0.1, 6.0±0.1, and 23.5±0.1, respectively)…]

Read: water’s specific gravity is just like that of water! Also, when we dissolve things in water, the specific gravity goes up! Who would’ve thunk.

Then there seems even to be pro-Brix propaganda. Here’s a pamphlet that seems to be targeted at farmers published by an organic fertilizer company: http://www.nutritionsecurity.org/PDF/Brix.pdf, which on its first page unambiguously states that BRIX=QUALITY. Further along it states in the same bullet list:

• BRIX is a measure of the percent solids (TSS) in a given weight of plant juice—nothing more—and nothing less.
• BRIX varies directly with plant QUALITY. For instance, a poor, sour tasting grape from worn out land can test 8 or less BRIX. On the other hand, a full flavored, delicious grape, grown on rich, fertile soil can test 24 or better BRIX.

So percent solids of plant juice varies directly with quality? A shriveled old grape will have a higher percent solids, corresponding to a higher Brix reading, but not necessarily be more delicious. Why are they trying to convince farmers otherwise? The pamphlet also includes 3 pages of tables of ‘good’ Brix values for different foods. What do these refractometer pushers think they mean? More importantly, why aren’t they showing what exactly is the Brix data they’re measuring?

Left: the cover of the pamphlet with the logo of the fertilizer company and an odd graphic of produce with a molecular structure overlay which seems to indicate it is the molecular structure of sugar? Right: an infographic depicting YOU taking refractometer measurements.

Then near the end of the pamphlet there is the calling out to the farmer/citizen-consumer:
YOU, not some scientist in a lab coat, can test the food you want to buy.
YOU can determine QUALITY at the point of sale.
YOU will gain back a little control over YOUR life.
Why are they trying to pretend that a handheld refractometer for measuring specific gravity is somehow magically going to give us control over the quality of produce we consume? Does their fertilizer increase the TSS of the plants that grow with them, and therefore would this show that plants grown with their fertilizer are much better? Are they really convolutedly trying to sell more of their fertilizer to farmers through with technobabble?

But I am getting carried away in this interlude, and will now return to chefs. Dan Barber also seems to be eating this proverbial dog food, and is probably encouraging refractometer use for Brix measurements amongst the farmers that supply his restaurants. Situated against a background of factory farming and highly optimised growing processes, it makes sense for small-scale farmers and citizen-consumers to reach for small-scale instrumentation to try to measure quality and optimise their crops/livestock. But so far we haven’t proven that we are optimising anything. We haven’t proven that the percent solids in plant juice is an indicator of flavour. We haven’t proven that flavour, as tasted by western eating bodies, is any indicator of the healthful qualities of food. While I’m in no way a proponent of the current bioindustry and its factory farming processes, I think we need to refine our argument.

What are types of small-scale analytical instrumentation that can be used to determine crop and livestock health? How can they be used by farmers in the field? How can we educate ourselves on healthful farming practices without having to piggyback on the marketing efforts of companies trying to sell products (like fertilizer)? How can we get more delicious produce and meats in supermarkets?

I think Annemarie Mol would try to bring the questions back to the western citizen-consumer, or the eating body itself. Can we modify ourselves by modifying the socio-material constructs that form our desires? I.e. can we counter advertising that has as a goal sales with an environment that forms the normative (healthy) foodie? How can we propagate knowledge and skills through a loosely interconnected network of farmers, citizen-consumers and restaureurs?

addendum
A different type of question from an admiring audience member at Dan Barbers talk still questioned the feasibility of only ‘modernist’ farming: “Dear Dan, Most of us cannot afford to be foodies. What do we do?”. And here is where Dan Barber managed an it-really-IS-better Bill-McDonough answer. He pointed to synthetic fertilizers and mentioned they were a petroleum product, and with current soaring crude oil prices, fertilizer was becoming more expensive, which was making livestock feed more expensive, which was making the copious amount of meat we eat more expensive. He mentioned that Pilgrim’s Pride (one of the world’s largest poultry farmers, NYSE: PPC) had been losing billions of dollars because of this.

I casually tried to verify the causality that Dan Barber was pointing to by comparing a chart of crude oil prices to the stock prices of Pilgrim’s pride, but I didn’t really see the inversely proportional relation I was looking for. In fact, it looks more like when oil prices are high, Pilgrim’s Pride stock is high too.

From http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:PPC with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brent_Spot_monthly.svg

Urban feeds es un workshop de 4 días dedicado al desarrollo de dispositivos de captura de datos en la ciudad. Equipados con sensores y antena GPS, estas interfaces permiten relacionar valores de nuestro ambiente “no visibles” con la localización de actividades, personas y eventos. Urban feeds nace del workshop Smart Geometry 2011 en Copenhague (http://issuu.com/fablabbcn/docs/ urbanfeeds). Allí se desarrollaron workflows a través de diferentes plataformas open-source para el uso y análisis de información personal en la ciudad, y su aplicación como herramienta de diseño y de influencia en el comportamiento de los ciudadanos.

Read more here.

Lima has an electronics market district called Paruro where you can buy anytime from regular ol’ through hole components to weird USB connectors to stepper motors harvested from printers. It’s in the center of the city, and not exactly the kind of place a tourist should be sampling local cuisine, which didn’t stop a new friend from trying some type of tea called emolliente and peacing out with with a severe case of the shits.

Ordering a press and peel etched board, a.k.a. ‘planchado’

nice etching work conditions…

But to the order of business. Last time Jeff and I were here we taught a workshop at Escuelab, and I had an arduino with me which caused some excitement amongst the participants. Technically ironic, as there were a bunch of microcontrollers already there, but arduino also offers access to a slightly more exciting curriculum and community than your typical 101 interesting 555 timer circuits crowd. Also, not everyone carries an avr programmer in their purse. Or two. Ahem.

the first prototype parurino!

So this time around, we looked into making an arduino from locally sourced parts. Since FTDI chips are an ass to solder and it’s hard to find SMD parts here, we went with the RS-232 based Arduino Severino as designed by Adilson Akashi, and for all those serialportless laptops out there (like, every single one, even though usb->serial converters are probably THE WORST THING EVAR… oh cry) we figured people could buy a dongle.

passive components

bill of materials for small parts

So I made my first angel investment of 100 USD (to the total investment of 400 USD) to make 50 kits (incl. locally made PCB), explanatory posters and um, some antibiotics for the aforementioned ill-fated. Now you can get a Parurino kit (with atmega8) for around 40 soles.

Click on the poster for more information!

I’m in Argentina, but everyone else is doing a Parurino workshop now on the last day in Lima. Fun times, yeah.