My Blog has been Hibernating... I have not.

I've been busy with my own projects as well as projects for classes.

My main project right now is still my cap for water bottles that essentially turns them into sippy cups for kids. I don't think I've blogged about this before (except for a logo design I did), but other than that I don't believe I've mentioned it. I would really like to show all of my drawings and the progress I've made from the very inception of the idea (a dream... within a dream!), but for the sake of keeping the patentable portions of the design secret, I can't show very much or really describe it in any amount of detail. But to recap the progress, at the end of last semester I entered and won the business plan competition in the Entrepreneur Certification Program at KU. The plan detailed the design of the cap and how I was going to make money off of it (typical business plan I suppose, all about making money). Then with a portion of the winnings, I conducted a formal patent search (of which the results were very favorable), then I hired a patent attorney and we filed a provisional patent and are currently working on the non-provisional. The concept of the cap's operation is solid, I just need to build some prototypes and then a small run of the product for testing in order to have anything to take to manufacturers. That's what I've been working on now for the past few weeks and am finally starting to make some decent headway. I've had one cap drawn up in CAD and then printed on a 3D printer, I've also been pouring some molds to test different facets of the cap and whether or not the design is as good as I think it is. Now, I'm getting a lot closer to having a small run of the cap produced to be tested in the field. And that's where that is... I'll try to maintain updates.

My OTHER project is a drum coffee roaster that is being fashioned out of a toaster oven. I can show you drawings of this and will try to be even better about updating this project, since it's more fun... who doesn't like roasting coffee? Not more than 10 minutes ago I just received 5 pounds of Sumatra Manhelding green coffee beans in the mail. They're just WAITING to be roasted! In the past, I've used a regular oven in the house (can you say fire alarm?), a toaster oven (simple and good results, but hard to get a really even roast), and a hot air popcorn popper (not really that fun or that good of results, it will have new life though with my homemade roaster).

THE PLAN
-Put a small 5 inch diameter barrel inside of the toaster oven.
-Connect it to a motor to turn it. (ya know, like a cement mixer)
-Use the popper as a cooling fan and chamber to quickly cool the beans and remove the chaff.
-Plus some other various random things to make it wicked awesome.
-And finally, to drink lots of coffee.