Apr 11, 2026

Senseo Interlude: Considering Quality

In the conceptual story of how the temperature inside the boiler is converted into something the MCU works with, the ADC only came up briefly in trying to convert the analog voltage into a digital number. It essentially asked how big a voltage (from the temperature - through voltage division) was compared to a known reference, and then represents that as a number between 0 and 1023.

Considering this ADC component physically therefore entails looking mainly at its core feature, the (likely integrated StrongARM) comparator. Now we won’t do that, and from now on will also only consider the remaining MCU subsystems briefly and strictly conceptually. My reasoning for this is that the philosophy behind this series is such that we seek to understand in order to be able to reproduce the idea of the Senseo. There is no way we can reproduce the MCU in any meaningful way, for we don’t know the design choices, and merely look at the likely components and how they’re functioning. For instance the Schmitt trigger for which my random guess was taken conservatively as the initial design from the eighties, since the paper is found online. This takes us away from the machine itself and lands us in the world of engineering and analytical thought alone, resulting in scope creep.

Once such a misalignment appears between what is produced and what is inherently useful to explore, gumption traps of the sort Robert Pirsig speaks of appear. As is what I’ve experienced many times over the past couple of months with this Senseo series.

The main goal of this series was to figure out how to be able to reproduce a simple kitchen appliance from scratch in case I’d be transported back to the time of Augustus and Agrippa. My conclusion on this front is that that would be infeasible to a certain extent. The life work in the scenario of being transported back would be to invent electricity myself, which would likely be done via the use of the many aqueducts and other hydro inventions of the time. Yet still there’s the need for raw materials as well, but we’ll consider this in a later chapter.

I think another implicit goal that is much more feasible given the topics at hand is to imagine ourselves to get stuck in a country on earth where we find only remnants of western industrial society. For the sake of the argument, imagine we’re suddenly stuck in a Sub-Sahara African country where electricity exists but is scarce, and we find piles of rubble consisting of trash from the western world’s recycling centers.

If you’re stranded in a place like that, and are dying for a cup of Senseo coffee, you’d be able to manufacture something from scraps of tea kettles for a boiler, washing machines for a pump, and any machine available among the scrap for wiring and tubing to make something functional.

On the other hand, there’s practically no way to reproduce the PCB itself, let alone the microcontroller. The extreme specialization going into these components makes it so that they’re basically irreproducible. That’s then what leads me to the prioritization of the understanding of the real physical components, instead of those that are so tailor-made their literal design isn’t even public knowledge.

Gumption

In the prelude I made the conscious distinction between a person A, whose main occupation constitutes their whole person, and person B, that unique individual whose interests and knowledge is proportionally underdeveloped. In this quest to fix person B’s development to the present by creating an “identity anchor”, there may be certain challenges and hurdles presenting themselves.

It’s in the pursuit of this anchor that I myself have found quite a few. Robert Pirsig’s Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance then sheds light on the possible issues that can emerge, as well as providing a lens through which to approach the ideal path for this development. The hurdles Pirsig talks about are called Gumption traps, where gumption itself refers to a kind of reservoir of energetic enthusiasm or good spirits.

As Robert Pirsig describes it:

“A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes.”

“The gumption filling process occurs when one is quiet long enough to see and hear and feel the real universe, not just one’s own stale opinions about it.”

“It’s the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going”

“If you haven’t got it the motorcycle won’t get fixed. If you’ve got it, and know how to keep it, there’s no way the motorcycle can keep from getting fixed.”

“Therefore the thing that must be monitored at all times and preserved before anything else is the gumption.”

Gumption traps are then considered those events that drain gumption and leave someone discouraged. These come in all shapes and sizes, think for instance of the misplacement of a tool during reassembly (I used the example of screws of a Velux in my Quality blog - link above). Another one is writing a whole post about something based on the socratic interrogation of GPT, then dissecting what it is further and realizing all was for nothing (e.g. the Schmitt trigger). These are considered external gumption traps.

“As it’s a result of the perception of Quality, a gumption trap, consequently, can be defined as anything that causes one to lose sight of Quality, and thus lose one’s enthusiasm for what one is doing.”

The internal gumption traps, which are a lot more plentiful and dangerous, consist of several subgroups:

Value rigidity: This is about making a commitment to some idea early on and then not being able to see reality for what it is because we view it through the lens of that commitment. Our prior belief is so misaligned with what reality is that we get lost in the noise. In terms of Quality being able to appear, once we truly engage with the present and the activity, those aspects creating the problem naturally filter themselves out because their presence has value. If we’re committed to the wrong idea, we cannot value the right information, so remain confounded to the real issue.

For instance, when I’m writing on MOSFET transistors and am convinced that an NMOS body is N-type, while it’s the channel that’s N-type while the body is P-type, I’ll never truly understand why it can behave the way it does and why it’s only natural for PMOS to be attached to power (VDD) and NMOS to be attached to ground (GND). Before, it wasn’t even about the order and physical setup, it was more conceptual. That’s because I didn’t see value in that piece of information. This is then exactly why I’ve had to go back and rewrite posts 11-14 of the series. Slowing the process of the series in general. The gumption drainage resulting of this was quite apparent.

“All information around is preselected on the basis of Quality. Most information has negative Quality. If we’d give value to each sound, sight or feeling we experience, we’d be jammed with meaningless data … This can be put differently, the track of Quality preselects what data we’re going to become conscious of. It makes this preselection in such a way as to best harmonize what we are with what we are becoming. “

Solution: Go very slowly and double check your past thinking and work. If you re-read something you wrote and cannot understand it, you’re likely holding on to a false idea. Best thing to do is to just sit with what you have for a while.

Ego traps: Are about the fact that if someone has a high evaluation of themselves, their ability to recognize new facts becomes weakened. As a result, you go along with wrong information because it feels good. To be successful you need to be modest and quiet (have humility) and be open to being wrong. As Pirsig says “You get discouraged easily if you derive your gumption from ego rather than Quality.”

Solution: By assuming you’re not amazing at it, you get the opportunity to get a little gumption every time you turn out to be right.

Anxiety: Is when you’re so sure you’ll do things wrong you don’t make a move at all. This is often a bigger reason for people not getting started on something than laziness. Through over-motivation you then get started but by being so hyped up you start working on all the wrong things. You don’t see the facts as they are anymore (nothing gets particular value). From the errors resulting from this you get confirmation that you’re not good at it, and the loop continues.

Solution: Work it out with pen and paper, and read as many books or articles on the subject as you can. Familiarity and engagement with the topic help.

Boredom: Often goes with the ego traps and indicates your gumption is low and needs replenishing before continuing, otherwise more and serious errors will arise.

Solution: Take a break and walk away for a little.

Impatience: Similar to boredom but resulting from the underestimation of the time needed to finish something.

Solution: Requires some value flexibility but the overall goal must be scaled down in importance and the immediate ones scaled up. Usually still some small gumption loss, but smaller than the alternative of making errors (like the unreadable posts 11-14 I went back for).

Truth traps: this one blocks cognitive understanding. For the most part the truth is handled by science, but there remains the danger of the Yes/No Truth trap. This entails that we’re used to seeing things in a binary way, even where no binary options are appropriate, thus oversimplifying reality and not being aligned with it. The Japanese have a saying “Mu” which means “No thing” and prescribes to un-answer the question (says neither yes or no, but critiques the dualistic way of thinking). Pirsig gives here the example of whether a dog can have a buddha personality, to which the answer is Mu - either answer would be wrong. “The buddha nature cannot be captured by a yes or no question.”

He similarly gives the example of the computer, which is perhaps a little more relevant to our story here. Bits are supposed to be binary digits, 1 and 0, yet when the power is off, there is no such thing as a 1 and a 0, the dualistic dimension disappears.

Solution: Mu 無

Muscle traps: blocks the psychomotor behavior. It about the phenomenon where the person building something simply doesn’t have the proper tools to build it. It completely drains them of energy and motivation. The gumption depletes extremely fast. Pirsig here keeps his advice tailored to motorcycles, but the gist can still be useful. He basically argues that you must either try to find proper tools via second hand stores (since proper tools don’t wear off), or build your own tools, which creates gumption in itself.

Solution: Take care of your surroundings in the place you’re doing work.

”There’s something to be said about having to live right in order to be able to get the right gumption. If you want to be able to paint the perfect scene, you yourself must become perfect and then just paint naturally. The way you live is what predisposes you to seeing the right facts and avoiding traps. The real [motor]cycle you’re working on is the cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be ‘out there’ and the person that appears to be ‘in here’ are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.“

Now what can we learn for our person B from the Gumption traps and scope creep?

Well for one, these external traps seem to be more dangerous when the task is defined, contained and mainly suffers if the scope of its work becomes undefined. Think of the replacement of the Velux I talked of. It’s biggest danger was that I lost something in the process, and therefore couldn’t do it in the implicit predefined time I had in mind. Another would’ve been muscle traps, and not having the right hex key to mount the Velux. Fortunately, someone at Velux is aware of these gumption traps and included one themselves.

On the other hand, the internal traps are more plentiful, and over the course of the past months, I likely encountered at least three quarters of this list (note that the real list is inexhaustible).

But the answer to this question is not one that can be answered directly. It seems to me we must do so via negativa, and look at what we must not do in order to avoid losing gumption. And it becomes quite clear: be clear in your methodology, have a pen and notebook on hand at all times. Have a clean work desk and time of day where no one can bother you. Define tasks within the task and be very strict in the scope of each. Re-read and go over prior ground to see if you’ve lost the thread of sanity. Most of all, engage with the topic and the philosophy behind the project enough to constantly be reminded of what should and shouldn’t be explored and worked on. Only through real engagement do we see what information has value and what doesn’t. That’s the only way Quality is able to emerge.

GPT and Resource Scarcity

Something to consider is the use of GPT as a resource for the Senseo series. I suppose nothing is wrong with this, and I’ve been doing this since the beginning, yet still it feels strange and almost like cheating as I’m used to writing papers and having nice bibliographies. I’m not letting it write anything, and our interactions on this topic feel more like the socratic method of learning, but still…

Realistically, its use is aligned with the muscle trap, for truly it’s impossible to find readable explanations of transistors or even electricity online. They’re written by engineers for engineers (or for children but then it’s oversimplified and incomplete).

And again it creates a tough situation from a Quality perspective. If we go too deep into this socratic interrogation, we lose the thread of what leads us to the end goal and what doesn’t, of what is valuable info and what isn’t.

On the other hand, the Quality relationship is proportional to the gumption relationship. If we don’t have the enthusiasm to stand at the front of the train of our own awareness to meet the new info coming up, we won’t really engage with what we’re doing.

So the solution in turn creates a new form of the problem, albeit in a different wrapping. My ideas on this is that it’s still worthwhile, for it’s the only feasible way to go on, and the muscle trap is likely more damaging for gumption than the loss of thread. The loss of thread can be semi remedied by being sufficiently outside of the GPT conversation as well, and resist the urge to ask also for what a next step or component might be. It’s easy in the realm of readily available information to slip from technical questioning to full on scaffolding, but that’s exactly the edge that must be defined and separated. The relevance of the task we’re working on within the bigger project must be revealed through engagement. I don’t yet have all the answers to this though.

All that being said I’ve got end of period assignments and exams coming up, and in order not to have Bayesian, survival and robust statistics kick my ass, my efforts on the front of this series will be put on hold for a couple of months.