Pop! Imagine the juxtaposition of separated flavors colliding upon anticipation to explode like gastronomic fireworks when hitting the eager tongue. Spherification, as its called, is the culinary process of shaping a [any?] liquid into spheres which visually and texturally resemble caviar. I was inspired to experiment from reading, The Kitchen as Laboratory: Reflections on the Science of Food and Cooking, that I picked up from Experimental Cuisine Collective meeting held at NYU’Chemistry department. Resembling science or foodie design more than cooking, spherification still offers a fun, new way to play with one’s food. The spherical mango ravioli is made with the basic spherification technique and is based on a simple mango puree. This is an easy to follow recipe even if you haven’t experimented with spherification yet.

Mango Ravioli Ingredients:

- 250 g ( 8.8 oz) of water

- 1.3 g sodium citrate

- 1.8 g sodium alginate (0.36%)

- 250 g mango puree

Calcium Bath

- 1000 g (35 oz) of water

- 5 g calcium chloride

On the pcomp front, its been a real nightmare ordering parts for my 3D burrito printer. A frustrating, expensive nightmare but lessons learned. Hair pulling since there is no actual documentation of how to build a DIY food printer. For once, it appears no one has done this before. Am I really the first? Curious as the open-source digital fabrication/3d printer community gains momentum, I don’t know whether I to be encouraged or disheartened by this apparent lack of DIY food printer models to follow. So, doing my best to ignore those detracting voices inside my head I cobbled together a exploratory BOM (Bill of Materials) spreadsheet of equipment I think i’ll need based on the REPRAP printer, buildlog.net’s ORD Bot (which itself is a variant of a REPRAP printer), Cornell’s Fab@Home printer as well as the Frostruder MK2 from MakerBot. While these systems are open source they sometimes call for parts that are proprietary and/or difficult to find much less acquire. There’s more frustration to this story but I’ll stop here before I go into full on rant mode. Note to self and other makers, don’t take for granted that open source designs mean accessible, easy to get, off-the-shelf parts. It can later turn out some essential components are proprietary and difficult to find or fashion for an alternative fix. But, I finally have almost everything I need to get started with the build. Time to BUILD!

I’ve been meeting a couple times with ITP Alum John Dimatos who is now over at MakerBot. His advice and encouragement so far has been invaluable towards Burritob0t’s birth. Actually, he gave me pages of input and directions BB could go in. I definitely owe him one of the first burrito’s to come out of the machine and a cold beer.

Oh, almost forgot. Working on the script and shot list for my Kickstarter video. Inspired by this kitschy 1950′s advertising film about the Kitchen of the Future. Really excited to actually shoot it with my buddy Jeff Howard.

I’m finding this turret design with the ingredients rotating on top of the printer head might lead to potential issues. Might it be easier to go with a normal single line printer head with different food canisters feeding into one line? Also, some gastronomic questions come into play. How important is taste? Many people I speak to about the process, especially when I mention the canisters/air solenoids, recall taco bell and its sour cream gun. Does it need to taste good to be successful? How important is form? Is it still a burrito if its, for instance square, like a hot pocket?

Jie Qi, from the High-Low Tech Group at MIT Media Lab, gave a short intro into the world of electronic popables and Shape-Memory Alloys (SMAs) – an integration of paper, electronics, mechanics and computation. I call it electronic origami. Many cool ideas are possible from this mix of paper circuits:

• Pop-up Books
• Paper Mixtapes
• Paper dj/vj GIF mixer
• Circuit Graffiti
• Actuated Fashions/Textiles
• Actuated Living Architectures

Jie Qi offered many helpful tips for working with these responsive materials like memory metals(nitinol/flexinol wire), , 3M copper tape, fabric tape(expensive but more flexible). Sites like robotshop and her MakeZine blogpost are also excellent resources. The trick is to find the “sweet spot” between calculating for the correct resistance and finding the just-right combination of wire gauge to paper weight. Higher heat, thicker gauge wire is stronger but requires more power(resistance) and smaller gauge is weaker but easier to work with (i guess she means, easier to power). She suggested we start off with 0.006 HT wire to play with. You can’t solder directly to nitinol/flexinol so she suggested wrapping leads to a crimp tube and soldering to it, instead.

0.006
R = 1.3 Ω/ in
current = 0.4 amp
wall wart 5v (cellphone charges work well)

V = current * resistance
5v = 0.4 a * r = 12.5Ω
12.5 ohm = 1.3Ω/in * Length = 9.6 in

According to Jie Qi:

The hardest part about using muscle wire is controlling the amount of current running through the wire. You want to give it enough for a dramatic effect, but not so much current that the wire burns out (and stops contracting). Flexinol wire has a consistent resistance per length and an optimum current as specified in the flexinol technical data.

One simple technique is to look at the target current from the data sheet and then use Ohm’s law (voltage = current x resistance) to calculate the length of wire that is needed to maintain this amount of current based on the power supply you have. Since these wires generally require hundreds of milliamps, I recommend getting a strong lithium-ion battery or use a wall power supply. For example, if I were using the 0.006″ diameter wire, which needs 0.400 Amps, and I have a 5V power supply, I would need a total resistance of 5/0.4 = 12.5 ohms. Since the resistance of this particular wire is 1.3 ohms/in, I would need 12.5/1.3 = 9.5 inches.

In general, always test your mechanism using low power and turn on the wire in short intervals. If you see a jerking motion, chances are the wire has gotten too much power and might in fact have burned out. If you have an Arduino, you can hook up the wire using a transistor and PWM the power. Start with a low duty cycle and work your way up until you get a strong enough movement. Note that once the metal is getting enough power to change shape, adding more power won’t make the movement more dramatic, it will only make the shape change more quickly.

Then you get to do fun stuff like ticklish plants or animated vines.

I would like to render digitally fabricated (I know, I know) paper cutouts of odd, mythical creatures inhabiting tableus inspired from Jorge Luis Borges, Book of Imaginary Beings.  Above and below are some examples of how this might look like(not to scale). This project seeks to inhabit liminal space existing somewhere between Joe Hamilton’s Hyper Geography and Anna Garforth’s Wandering Territory. Taking advantage of the unique, odds-and-ends of Scholes, it might prove interesting to situate such tableaus in peripheral, atypical settings -  under or above a stairwell; nestled inside a hole in the wall;  suspended below or above a skylight. I would really like to highlight the illusion of a microcosm/tiny world using a combination of shadow lighting, projection mapping, and perspective. Ideally, I envision the paper responding to a person’s presence using Shape-Memory Alloy(my blog post about the subject), where leaves and vines might shudder and slither or creatures animate, using flexinol wire, similar to the work of Jie Qi.