The Continuing Saga of SCOBY Leather

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The blended SCOBY fruit roll-up leather experiment is finally more or less dry. It took hours and hours in a 120 degree Fahrenheit oven before the water was driven off, and the resulting leather seems strong and beautifully semi-translucent.

Blended SCOBY Leather

Not sure what exactly we’ll do with it, other than maybe subdivide it for various experiments. Meanwhile, I took a look at the SCOBY net experiment, and was surprised to find that a nice pellicle had formed above the net, and that it had grown through the net at the edges.

SCOBY in a Mat

I decided to flip it over to see if another layer might grow on top, and then we’ll maybe press it flat to dry, encasing the hemp net between the layers of leather?

Flipped

For future experiments, it would probably be best to find a way to suspend the net right at the surface of the tea and sugar mixture, so that the pellicle becomes more integrated into the net. Maybe a purpose built, adjustable frame that can be moved up or down to account for liquid loss?

SCOBY Mush to SCOBY Leather

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Inspired by this process for turning SCOBY into fruit leather…

…we decided to prototype a process to turn some mature SCOBY into mush, dry it in a form, and look at the material properties of the finished product. We borrowed a blender and rinsed and blended up a not insignificant quantity of SCOBY, adding a little bit of water to keep things moving.

Max Mixes

We weren’t able to find exactly the right vessel, so we improvised, building little dam made of wood to get to the size we wanted.

SCOBY Mush

The material is surprisingly coherent, and the dam acted as a bit of a liquid separator.

The Product

The form filled, we stuck it in the oven at 200 degrees Fahrenheit (the lowest the oven in the nutrition classroom will go), and it’s gently baking even as I’m writing this.

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In related news, we modified the fermentation chamber, adding a heat mat to see if we can improve the growth rate of the pellicle by increasing the temperature a bit. The mat has a fixed temp, and as it turns out that temp is too high, so we’ll need to look into adding a thermostat to reign that in a bit. Eventually, we plan to construct an Arduino-based, temperature controlled growing chamber that will will log data to a Web-accessible database, but that’s a few weeks out.

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SCOBY Harvest

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We decided to harvest and dry one of the big SCOBYs today.

Booch Leather

As we removed it from the tea, the SCOBY separated into two layers, which we washed and rinsed.

Washing the SCOBY

The top layer was thick and uneven and prone to tearing as we arranged it on a piece of cardboard to dry.

Top Piece

The bottom layer was thin and unblemished and surprisingly strong. It’s barely visible on the plywood.

Quality SCOBY

We mixed up some sugar water, and added it to both the now empty grow chamber, and to the undisturbed second batch. We’ll wait a week to harvest and cure the SCOBY growing therein.

Hungry Booch

A Typical Week in the Makerspace

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Turns out there isn’t any such thing.

A visit from Intel’s Samer Batarseh to talk about the three ships: partner, mentor, and intern…

Samer from Intel Visits the Makerspace

Max Mahoney planting hops out in the Backyard for some fermentation science and IoT experiments…

Max Plants

Sociology students doing some design thinking in the Living Room…

Sociology Students Solutioning

Volunteers converting the Living Room into a Vive holodeck…

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Rebekah perfecting our new low resolution prototyping supply cart…

Low resolution prototyping cart

A student-organized/planned/led workshop using the laser cutter to create dice…

WoodWorkingWorkshop

FLC Raptors Overwatch team photo…

FLC Raptors Overwatch Team

A Skittles sorter?

Skittles Sorter

Emma (student and VR volunteer at the Folsom Public Library) standing up our Oculus rig…

Emma Getting the Oculus Set Up

The space – the community, really – feels different these days.  The point at which it becomes difficult to keep track of all the creative things happening is the point at which the community seems to have achieved a level of momentum, of (sometimes shambolic) vibrancy. I open my office door and am surprised by the buzz.  Daily.

University Innovation Fellows Meetup 2017

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Rebekah and Nathaniel (students, Innovation Center employees, the finest people you’d ever want to meet) completed the University Innovation Fellows program:

The University Innovation Fellows is a program of Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school). The program was created as part of the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter), a five-year National Science Foundation grant.

The three of us recently attended the multi-day UIF Meetup culminating event. On day one, at the hotel in Sunnyvale, we boarded buses and headed to Google for a day of tours, guest speakers, and design thinking challenges. Highlights included a tour of the The Garage, Google’s in-house makerspace, and a thought-provoking talk from none other than Ray Kurzweil.

Day 1 photo gallery:

University Innovation Fellows Meetup 2017 Day 1

Days two and three were held at the d.school at Stanford. Of particular interest to our work in the Innovation Center were discussions by d.school students and faculty about the way that the physical space communicates expectations, and in particular the design considerations employed to make the d.school a flexible environment for all kinds of activity, from meetings to design thinking to prototyping. I took a lot of pictures of signage and furniture!

Day 2 photo gallery:

University Innovation Fellows Meetup 2017 Day 2

Day three began with taiko drumming, and a brilliant presentation by Ge Wang, electronic musician, inventor, and creator of the ChucK programming language.  The rest of the day was spent working through a design challenge, with technology and music industry experts, including August de los Reyes (designer of the X-Box and lead designer at Pinterest), and representatives from the Common Ground Foundation and Pandora circulating and interacting with students.

Day 3 photo gallery:

University Innovation Fellows Meetup 2017 Day 3

An intense experience to be sure, and Rebekah and Nathaniel and I left with a deeper understanding of Design Thinking, and of the many ways that the physical environment can be used to facilitate communication and problem solving, lessons that we’ll employ as we continue to build out Innovation Center offerings.

A Wild Robot Appears!

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We got a telepresence robot. So far so good. Simple to operate, relatively stable, although I have flipped it on its back a few times, but in any case it’s certainly rugged.

Planning some spring prototypes, including orientation, tours, Library instruction, telemedicine, guest speakers, and general silliness.

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Calculus Models and Learning From Students

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Below is Alex Hartigan, a Folsom Lake College Engineering student preparing some Calculus III models he’s been developing in collaboration with Kevin Pipkin (Math) and that he printed on the new Form 2, which has gotten a lot of use lately, most recently with the Enabling the Future project.

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Alex and I connected last semester, and finally got the chance to work together on this Math project. Alex has a lot of skills in 3D design and printing, as well as experience on the Form 1, and through the process of preparing the Calc models, he taught me a whole lot about the finer points of printing on the Form 2, including various layout tips, and the manual editing of supports.

The Form 2 models came out great:

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The Ultimaker 2 ones, not so much, though the failure at least resulted in some interesting artifacts:

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Best of all, Max Mahoney (Chemistry) dropped by, and we recruited Alex to work on the chemistry project we prototyped the other day. One of my favorite parts of working with students is learning from them, and I hope to learn a lot from Alex before he heads off to Sac State next fall.

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Enabling the Future – 3D Printed Hands

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The recent EpiPen controversy led to lots of good conversations this week with various faculty about “medical making,” either as a new class in our upcoming MAKR certificate, a semester-long sort of focus, similar to things like One Book, or as some focus within the larger construct of Making + Doing, which is an idea we’ve been kicking around as a way to intertwine making and service learning.  One of the projects that emerged from those conversation is Enabling the Future, an “amazing group of individuals from all over the world who are using their 3D printers to create free 3D printed hands and arms for those in need of an upper limb assistive device.”

Jennifer Kraemer (ECE) is interested in working such a project into the Making in ECE course she’s developing, so we decided to print up one of the hand systems, specifically the Raptor Reloaded. We set up a job on both the Ultimaker 2 Extended+ and the Form 2, so as to compare time and print quality.

A Tale of Two Printers

11ish hours later for the Ultimaker…

Raptor Reloaded on the Ultimaker

8ish hours later for the Form 2…

Raptor Reloaded on the Form 2

Here’s the initial build of the Form 2 version. The Form 2 resin creates a really nice finished product that takes well to fine tuning with a file.

Initial Assembly

Here’s the initial build of the Ultimaker version.

Initial Assembly - Ultimaker

I still need to get the screws and wire for the “tendons” to finish them up, but the initial results are promising.

OpenBCI: A Brain-Computer Interface

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Sean Fannon (Psychology) and I secured a small grant to get our hands on an OpenBCI, which is an open source brain-computer interface, complete with a headset that can be printed on a 3D printer.  Sean plans to use the device to enable students to do some fairly sophisticated brain research.  Fortunately, the new Ultimaker 2+ Extended has a sufficiently large build envelope, so I set it up to print half of the headset overnight, and watched it on YouTube in an obsessive way using the Open Broadcaster setup.

Printing OpenBCI Mark III

Came in this morning, and it all seems to have printed well. In what is a first, I think I might not have enough PLA on the spool to finish the job.  Unfortunately, the Ultimaker uses the fat stuff (2.85 mm), and the Printrbot uses 1.75 mm, which I’ve got a lot of. I read somewhere that the Ultimaker can be tweaked to run the smaller filament, so I might just have to give that a shot.  Some of the smaller bits I plan to use to test the Form 2 that should arrive some time in early July.

OpenBCI Ultracortex Mark III