Pulping with the Morovis

We hadn't been out picking for a couple of days, so when we did go out this morning we brought back about four gallons of cherries. Ideally, you want to pulp them no longer than three hours after picking, because they start to ferment instantly, and that degrades the taste if you can taste the difference. Which I can't. But we still pulp immediately after coming back.

We use this antique Morovis disk pulper which we have on loan from our friends up the hill. Morovis pulpers were originally built in the town of Morovis, then for many years by Maquinaria Cafetalera, Inc. in Bayamón. That company officially went out of business in 2014, although hadn't filed an annual report since at least 2009, as far back as digital records go.

The disk pulper was actually originally invented in Puerto Rico, you see, and was patented in 1964 by Juan Rivera, of Bayamón (US Patent 139,919). It's pretty unfortunate that Rivera patented the thing just as the Puerto Rican government was de-emphasizing agriculture, but them's the breaks. There are a few thousand of these antiques around the island, mostly sitting in people's back yards looking picturesque, evoking the coffee days of yore.

And then there's the one we're using, which works perfectly despite never being maintained. You just pour your coffee into the hopper on top, crank the wheel for a while, and the coffee beans come out one side and the pulp falls through  underneath. The pulp is fantastic garden mulch.

Then you leave your beans in water overnight so the mucilage ferments. Makes them much easier to wash.

 

Wiring up micro USB connectors

The Raspberry Pi has two micro USB connectors, one for power and the other for actual USB. For a compact head with both a Pi and an Arduino Nano, therefore, we need to fab some cables using DIY solder connectors, which I ordered a couple of months ago.

I wasn't sure how the four solder pads corresponded to the pinouts I need for power, and it turns out ... stuff is weird with the micro USB, which actually has *five* leads. One of which nobody uses - apparently it was for a protocol that didn't actually catch on. So many solderable micro USB connectors have five solder pads, but mine has only four.

 

Here are the pinouts.

Note that #2 is unused.

And here is the Pi, happily powered despite my horrible blobby soldering.

Coffeebotting

Back in 2015, I started a blog about harvesting coffee with robots. That ticked along for about a year and a half as we put together our first prototype, and then we bought a coffee farm. And then Hurricane Maria blew the roofs off our coffee farm and all the leaves off our coffee trees, and well, our lives turned into roofing and survival instead of robotic development.

But you know what happened this year?

We came out the other side. That's coffee ripening on our own trees. Two weeks ago we submitted a grant proposal to the USDA for a modified version of our original coffeebot project (we're focused on land tending first, because harvesting is hard). And you know, I think the world needs a coffeebot blog again. So I'm going to try it. I'm going to be posting pictures of coffee growing, coffee processing, and robot development, and yes, we do actually have a really limited amount of actual coffee for sale if you want to try some. It's good coffee. And it's not harvested by robots, but it might be the only coffee you can buy that's harvested by roboticists. And in a couple of years, we'll see where we stand.

Let's see where we can take this venture, shall we?