Time and Space: A schedule is formed!

The past couple weeks have seen some progress in my shifting gears from Coffee Shop to Solar Research & Development.  My wife has started working at the office and is fielding most of the calls & taking the weekly coffee orders.  She is also helping with much of the random delivering and picking-up of stuff! 

Parts are arriving from suppliers, and I am nearly ready to begin assembly in earnest of the first fully functioning heliostat motor unit.  I am also formalizing the bounds of the completed array and double-checking all the requirements for the heliostats and the other components. 

In other news, I will be more or less free to work on this 3 days a week + weekends after this month, that is once we create a TV commercial together for our coffee shops!  We need to boost our retail sales to get over the typical June-July cafe slump.  I'm hanging up posters for our new line of smoothies tomorrow.

It IS difficult to put together coherent time at the moment.  More on this later.

Now on Kickstarter

As of this morning, Solar Roast Coffee's Open Sun Project is on Kickstarter.  Check it out and watch our goofy short video presentation!    Link: Solar Roast KickStarter

Accepted to Kickstarter!

It's been a fair amount of preparation to get my whole fund-raising project organized, but I just found out that Solar Roast Coffee & the Open Sun Project has been accepted by Kickstarter.com!  For those of you who don't know, Kickstarter is an amazing online peer-to-peer fund-raising site that lets individuals pledge their support to projects.  The projects range from arts to film to science & technology and all share in the spirit of open-source & creative do-it-yourself-ness.  I'm pleased as all getup to be part of that crowd! 

     I'm spending the rest of the afternoon in After Effects, Lightwave, and Final Cut tweaking the short video for the website... geez, wish I had a better microphone when I was shooting.   Next time!

I have nearly all the parts now to build a full "Sigma-Style" heliostat for testing.  I just need band-saw blades and to clear the last of the mess out of the shop.  My wife is making this week's sales calls for me at the office.  (Actually, it seems like more people order coffee from a well-spoken female than from a goofy sounding scatterbrained dude like myself... go figure!)