Open Source Ecology Forums

Matt_Maier

I've been looking at the GVCS with a critical eye (it's a distraction from a paper that's hard to write) and I have some thoughts I'd like to get your reaction to:

* Why is there a bakery oven? This question is inspired by two facts 1) the rest of the machines are, more or less, tools that make tools (not consumables) and 2) there's no machine for making flour. Are we expecting to throw the grain into the hammermill or the pelletizer? Why skip over a flour mill and include a bakery oven that's totally out of place? Is the microcombine supposed to grind the grain too?

* Seems like some kind of modular shredder is missing. If we really want to recycle metal, then something like this is pretty much mandatory http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8zUwHj7yXM particularly something that could be adapted to crush rocks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2rVoCG7OBI&feature=related to feed into the CEB press or the cement mixer or something along those lines. The induction furnace is going to need small pieces of metal.

* Another thing that's missing is a crane. Maybe the backhoe could be designed to work as a crane.

* Why not a water cutter (rather than plasma)? There's no change to the material, there's practically no limit to what can be cut, it can cut much thicker material, it's often faster. Most significantly, a water cutting process requires nothing that can't be produced on-site and produces nothing that can't be recycled or cleanly disposed of. The process itself is even safer to be around. Seems like the only advantage plasma has is that it can cut some metals faster and might be cheaper.

* Listing a CNC circuit mill and 3D printer separately seems unnecessary. Any 3-axis CNC machine can become a 3D printer if you put an extruder on it. In the same way, the 3-axis CNC machine could become a 3D scanner if you put some lasers and a camera on it. Basically, it seems like these distinct machines are really all just functions of a single modular CNC platform.

* Does "industrial robot" mean a single robot arm design, or any of a wide variety of automated arms? If we're going to specifically list this shop tool why not add a center-pivot irrigation system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_pivot_irrigation ? Those things can have all sorts of automated tools added to them just like an industrial robot, only for planting, caring for, and harvesting plants instead.

* Perhaps the chipper hammermill could be replaced by the modular shredder. Or maybe it could be an attachment.

* Do you think the power cube should be designed such that it can become a stressed member of any vehicle it's incorporated into? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorcycle_frame#Engine_as_a_stressed_member Basically, the power cube is, by definition, going to be bulkier and heavier than strictly necessary. Also, it's not going to be able to neatly hang off the back of every vehicle like it does on the tractor. Adding MORE frame around it, so that a vehicle's frame is strong enough to handle the abuse of use, will just make everything that much bulkier and heavier. If the power cube frame had standardized mounting points built into it, then it could become part of the frame. That would mean that its frame would "pull its own weight" in terms of vehicle performance rather than be dead weight.

* Why isn't there a hydraulic cylinder on the list? We're going to use almost as many of those as hydraulic motors.

* Maybe it would be worth pursuing Aluminum-Air battery technology. If we're going to fly high in the blue skys with such ambitious projects as a universal power supply and green-aluminum micro-extraction, might as well go all the way. Aluminum-Air batteries are the only battery technology I've seen that have the potential to rival chemical fuels in terms of power density. And if we're already set up to harvest and recycle aluminum the marginal costs are much lower.

* The car and truck should be combined into a generic modular vehicle. While the idea of an efficient, open source car is sexy, it's also been done. Kind of like the 3D printer there's nothing for OSE to do except adopt one or more existing projects. Also, OSE is a farm that's supposed to produce everything we need, so comfort and/or commuting don't seem to be high on the list of priorities. All the vehicles it would be worth focusing on would be utility vehicles, which have distinctly different features than passenger/personal cars. Besides, the legal ramifications of designing/selling a vehicle to transport human beings are significant. It would make more sense to build farm utility vehicles than to compete with existing passenger cars. If (when) the OSE experiment works a person would arguably not even need to own a car. They could just rent one if they needed to drive really far.

* It seems like the GVCS should have a machine for turning nasty polluted water into clean water. Maybe a micro-sewage treatment plant if it comes to that. At a minimum, creating clean water for people, animals and machines is vital. At a maximum, the principles dictate that we recycle as much as possible, and anything we can't recycle be safe to dump.

Anywho, that's it for the time being. I'm really interested in seeing what thoughts people have along this kind of line.

dorkmo

when i have my farm... i'll need the bakery oven bc every meal is going to be pizza

good thoughts

i like the water cutter idea. are the nozzle materials sophisticated?

i'd also add to the car thoughts that hopefully soon we'll have robot car taxis.

i could see someone needing a truck to deliver to a farmers market or something like that.

i think a lot of the flaws of the list of 50 can mostly be hashed up to 'nobodys perfect' but i wouldnt mind seeing revisions to inactive projects.

Matt_Maier

I consolidated my ideas into a google spreadsheet, which will be here (if the link works) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en_US&hl=en_US&key=0AhxtAqPj-B8ndFU3VXpTaUxEQXdOcklOTXYyREpEOHc&output=html

Feel free to add comments in the sheet, but don't erase anything.

Clifton

Some good thought there...

The issue with a water cutter nozzle is not so much one of sophistication as expense. Generally we are talking about ruby in fair quantity. Abrasives are injected into the water stream and something very hard is needed to stand up to the environment. For this reason I wonder if water-cutting is OSE compatible.

I see both cars and trucks worth developing.. The scope of the total OSE vision is not just a farm, but entire small communities with localized economy and connection to other communities. This scope requires transportation over medium and large distances for both people and goods. Some places where the GVCS tools will be used, an OS car would be a good thing, other places, it would make no sense at all. Availability makes flexibility.

There is another missing piece that I have considered. In the stream of: raw biomass --> hammermill --> ____________ --> pelletizer --> gasifier / feed... there is a missing piece. Before you can make a cohesive and burnable pellet from biomass, you need to dry the biomass sufficiently. If one tries to pelletize something with too much moisture content the pellets will crumble. And of course you want your fuel dry. So a biomass dryer is needed in the space I left. Fortunately, the technology is fairly easy and fits right in to the rest of the GVCS 50. It would fit in the steam cycle. Superheated steam coming from the solar concentrator could be passed through the biomass dryer, evaporating moisture from the biomass and outputting dried biomass and a higher volume of slightly lower temp steam, this could then go drive the steam engine, etc. while the biomass could then be pelletized.

Matt_Maier

It seems like you can use a lot of different things as a water cutting abrasive. The expensive stuff is for the exotic hard metals.

The way I've been interpreting the GVCS is as a system of tools that make tools. For example, while a washing machine is absolutely something an OSE village would be able to produce, it doesn't contribute to the construction of the village, so it doesn't go into the GVCS. In the same way, a passenger car would be an appliance from an OSE point of view. It wouldn't do any construction/farm work, so it doesn't go in the GVCS. Also, there are significant legal/ethical issues with building something that will safely transport human beings at high speeds. It would be more economical to save a bunch of money with the GVCS and just buy an existing car that's already titled and registered and has air bags and whatnot.

Hmmm, I hadn't thought of the need to dry the biomass. I like the idea of using the steam running through the heat exchanger to dry out the biomass, particularly since you can add moisture to the biomass (if it's too dry) by just bleeding off some of the steam. http://pubs.cas.psu.edu/FreePubs/pdfs/uc203.pdf

Matt_Maier

http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/GVCS_Changes

Clifton

The ruby is not in the abrasive (AFAIK).. it is part of the nozzle itself. Very high pressure water plus abrasive grit will destroy most nozzle materials the same way it will cut materials, and you need a consistent and very fine aperture for a tightly controlled cutting stream, so basically it needs to wear very well.. Hence the use of ruby.

Dawg

You were asking why some items are missing from the 50. Why indeed. Personally I think there are several items that shouldn't be there at all.

You need to realize that this is all coming from Marcin with very little collaboration. So whatever he dreamed up or ran across got added. It's more a list of convenience than something logically created. Your ideas make perfect sense. My advice is try sending them directly to Marcin because he never reads the Forums.

Dawg
www.osrliving.org

Matt_Maier

Ah, alrightee then.

Who exactly IS actively developing the GVCS? I think I can name three. Not that I've specifically been searching that out, I'm just starting to get curious.

Mike_Apostol

hahah Matt...who indeed :D

Whoever wants to really! The number of total "active" designers though is certainly not a massive number lol...

But yes the main GVCS is being controlled by Marcin and I know from conversations we've had in the past he is aware that it will need to be revised. But it is a good starting point and provides the "GVCS 50" label which is important and palatable for general discussion purposes. However as the wiki is open, you can really just create any other sort of machines and link them in as I've seen others to do in the past. The hard part is the actual development. A lot of people have great ideas but not much experience in actual design, and that's the tricky part as the design is where a lot of the designs stop progressing. However the initial research into the various machines is critical and most anyone can do it.

Once the wiki is a bit more organized I'm going to start reaching out to more designers and engineers to try and actually get more active collaboration. But it's hard to right now as imho the chaos of the wiki (in terms of a method of collaborative design) is rather a turn-off.

As Dawg suggested I'd as well suggest sending Marcin an e-mail regarding your discussions for changes and that wiki page you started looks good. It's the effort of people like you and everyone else that puts time into it that keeps the open source hardware movement going. As long as that forward progress is continuing and people see that it isn't just stagnating it will attract more and more attention which is critical to any movement!

@Dawg - I took a look at your progress on the manual CEB press the other day and it's coming along well! I'm going to break down the CEB wiki into the different types (manual, automatic vertical chamber, automatic horizontal chamber, etc) and then the iterative designs of each have their own areas so that there is some semblance of organization. Is your design something you'd be fine with us linking to? It would be great to have your work in there.

Dawg

@Mike_Apostol Thank you Mike. Absolutely, we are all on the Open Source trail here. So feel free to add links all you want. We all need to work together eventually to create the communities of the future. What's the point building all this neat stuff if there's no community to use it in?

Dawg
www.osrliving.org

Matt_Maier

If you build it, they will come.

danielravennest

@Matt_Maier - Take a look at the functional block diagram I did last May: http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Functional_Block_Diagram_F.0_Global_Village_System

It's a single diagram, but for readability it is split into 3 parts. It shows the inputs and outputs for an entire village project at a high level. Then you break out each box and flow into more detail at lower levels. The idea is you couple this with an input-output spreadsheet, and do the analysis to make sure all the inputs, outputs, and flows add up. If you need 5 tons of steel plate to build all the machines, then that 5 tons has to come from somewhere, either output of a rolling mill, or you buy it from an outside source. You cannot have it appear like magic.

This kind of flow diagram is an engineering tool. it forces you to think quantitatively, and not leave holes. It also starts you thinking about things like "I need bearings, do I make them, or buy them? What machine do I make them with? How many bearings can it produce a year, and what else is that machine used for?" How many calories do you need for 200 people? What food mix can sustain them, and in turn how many acres and what farm implements are needed? Is 50 hp the right size tractor for that job?, etc etc etc.

The current GVCS, before your proposed changes, is a shotgun attempt to cover all that, but it doesn't seem to have the analysis to see if it all holds together. I think we need to do more analysis to link up all the bits and pieces.

I do agree with the idea you mentioned about "tools to make more tools". There is a set of tools that fit that category, and then a set of end items like a chair, which you make with tools, but is not used in further production. Tools making tools in an endless loop is pointless, some part of your production has to be end items, and how much of that you want to make has to be factored into the whole process.

Metz

I got the baking stove design already. I don't have wiki access to I can't post it. I sent it to Marcin by email... Never heard a word...

If you want to see the pros and cons of building a homemade water jet, visit cnczone.com where they have beat that subject to death.

A hypertherm plasma cutter 1/2 inch steel capability is $1800-1900 US. A Bosch colt router for a CNC table is a couple hundred dollars. 10 grand US will get you a very nice plasma/router table you can cut most stuff with that combo. Go up to oxy/acetylene torch and you can cut 4 inch steel, however the kerf in a oxy/acetylene torch is much larger than plasma.

Whereas you could not even start getting a reliable water jet for less than 100k US. A pump alone of that pressure capacity will start above 10k.

Btw, plasma can cut glass and other materials besides metal, although the tip life is very short doing so.

Mike_Apostol

Metz, can't you just create an openID/gmail/yahoo account and log in with that? I use my gmail account to work on the wiki without any issues. I don't recall having to be approved to do so either.

If it stlil doesn't work for you, send me an e-mail (mike dot apostol at gmail dot com) with what you sent Marcin and I'll add it into the wiki for you. Also do you have background information/research to accompany your design? That's just as important as the design itself.

Matt_Maier

@danielravennest that's cool. I was wondering if anyone did something like that. The wiki doesn't have a very good search function in it. Did you get anywhere with the associated spreadsheet? Do you think it's even possible to project what the entire village would need or do we just have to wait and see?

I think what's going to end up happening is the village will decide to specialize in one or two "cash crops" so they can buy all the things they can't make. Kind of like a nu-Amish economy. However, there will be a lot of baseline stuff that that can be projected. Like calories and BTUs.

One of the things I've been trying to push is making the "machines" more modular. Several of them would be more economical as systems rather than a single machine design.

@Metz damn, good point. It looks like a "bargain" 60Kpsi pump starts at more than $60K. Even assuming an open source one to be cheaper (1/5) you're still looking at $12K like you said. Assuming a GVCS-based shop isn't going to be doing high-volume production, it might be possible to get up to a useful amount of fluid at 60Kpsi if one was willing to wait around for the system to pressurize. A 60Kpsi pressure vessel is do able, especially if the internal volume is limited (and the engineering is done professionally). A pump could be rigged up to take advantage of leverage. It would take a while to pressurize, but it would get there with low-cost components.

At any rate, the whole idea of the torch table becomes questionable when I start to work backwards to where the metal will come from. I can totally see OSE building a mini-mill to produce steel bar and angle, probably even tube. However, big flat sheets are an entirely different world. Doing sheets of bioplastic is one thing, sheets of metal is an order of magnitude more of a thing.

Seems like it would make more sense to focus on building things out of bar stock and simply avoiding complex metal sheet shapes.

It's an interesting challenge.

danielravennest

@Matt_Maier - No, I had not gotten to a spreadsheet because the block diagrams are still too high a level. I did not invent this kind of analysis, it's standard engineering for complex systems. I put it there more to get people thinking about the GVCS as a whole system, rather than 50 disconnected machines. But you can't just wave your arms and say "these 50 will do everything", you really need to do the math and see if it holds together.

I agree that a village needs some kind of surplus to buy the stuff they can't make. Besides "cash crops", if running the village only takes 4 hours a day, then people can simply go get regular paid jobs the rest of the time to cover expenses. But until you get an estimate from a spreadsheet how much labor is needed, you can't even say if that is feasible or not, we just have too many holes in the data right now.

By the way, I didn't see a drill press in your revised GVCS list, and could not tell if the function was handled by something else, like the multimachine, or just forgotten. Since I just finished building a drill press conversion for a hand drill, I noticed it was missing. I'll be testing and documenting the one I made in the wiki shortly.

Matt_Maier

Yeah...about that. I haven't taken the time to check, but I'm pretty sure there are at least two versions of the GVCS floating around. For example, I copied my list out of a spreadsheet that's being used to estimate the total OSE budget and it doesn't include the "heat exchanger" that's clearly included on the list the wiki hosts. I'm not sure how many other discrepancies there are.

But I don't think it really matters. The way I see thing, the GVCS is more of a definition than a list. The "list of 50" is just convenient examples.

I saw an email from Marcin that had "from my iPhone" at the bottom. For someone who is literally living off of the idea of open sourcing everything, he doesn't seem to have a problem with Apple products (as opposed to, say, Android). In the same way, however, that's not a problem. Providing the world with better options is a big problem and you have to start from wherever you are. Use the best tools available to build better tools. If an iPhone is the best tool available at the moment, then using it isn't a contradiction. Just like if an imperfect GVCS is the best tool available at the moment, then using it is the right thing to do.

The reason the "back to the earth" hippies never got anywhere was that they refused to use the best tools available to them. They picked their tools based on philosophy rather than pragmatism. The same thing goes for most of the projects that are conceptual cousins to OSE. I've thrown my weight behind this project because I think it's got a real chance of succeeding. I don't think "succeeding" means total modern self-sufficiency...although that would be cool.

I think "succeeding" means proving that open source tools can produce powerful synergistic effects. For me, OSE will succeed when the tools it creates not only do what they are supposed to do, but also form the foundation of a hundred different open source projects. Kind of like Arduino for farms, or something like that.

Oh, back to the topic, I figured the drill press was included in the "multimachine" thing. Now that you mention it...it is kind of weird that the drill press is ALSO on the wiki, but not in that list I was using. Don't they already have the drill press working? I thought I'd seen videos of it drilling holes. If so, the design must not have been very good otherwise they would have included it in the recent DVD release.

danielravennest

My understanding is they were using a commercial magnetic drill press to do holes in the square tubing. That's sensible for working on big pieces of metal, its easier to move the drill and clamp it with an electromagnet than the reverse. I had not paid attention in the videos to see what other drill type devices were being used, especially since some of the work is being done by outside shops (like the sawmill prototype). I'm doing a bootstrap drill press because I want to make a bunch of the Grid Beam type modular construction for shop furniture, storage, and later on modular buildings. You need to drill a lot of evenly spaced holes for that.

The GVCS machines are being done at what I call heavy duty industrial scale. My approach is starting with what I have, which is more or less ordinary homeowner tools, and bootstrapping up from that a little at a time. Partly that's because it's just me at the moment, and I don't have the kind of budget that Factor e farm has. I would like to find some other people in the area to build up a "community DIY workshop", but for now I will make do with just me.

UtopianPragmatist

haha Matt, a lot of those back to earth hippies were perfectly successful - they're living in yurts and vibrating with the earth mother as we speak... but yeah i couldn't agree more with your sentiment; practicality is the driving force behind many of the truly great projects - wikipedia's step into a hierarchical structure for example let it establish a sold structure from which it could grow even though some anarchic minded people weren't too happy at the time. I don't see any problem with the GVCS making use of modern tools because we are in the modern age, i see projects like GVCS as being a thing which can only develop after certain modern contrivances have created the opportunity for it to be created - it's about using everything available to grow out of the constraints of the old system, the industrial revolution didn't forget the lessons of the agrarian age (and where it did we saw the great american dustbowl of Steinbeck) and i see no reasons why the post-industrial revolution should forget or ignore any lessons learnt in any grim coalary.

Certainly i can see a future where there are vast libraries of various Construction Set's - ones designed to bootstrap from soil alone, ones designed to bootstrap in an urban environment; even special camper van sets and scientific community projects, maybe space-station themed international projects open for all to get involved...

The great thing about openness and sharing is every project that creates something or documents trying something makes it easier for future projects to be better.

Matt_Maier

Ever read The Diamond Age? I like the idea of a "primer" that is smart enough to guide a person through learning literally any piece of human-accumulated knowledge they could possibly need. Get dropped into a forest naked, with a primer, and it could teach you how to do everything from scratch. It's possible, because someone did it at some point. So there's no reason you couldn't compress the process. Go from sharp sticks, to stone tools, to fire, to metal, to complex tools, to automation, and beyond.

That's sort of what I'd like to see eventually come of this. If someone wants freedom, then that kind of "primer" would guarantee it. If you don't like the place you live, and you think you could do better, just wander off. When you find an empty spot, settle down and start building. That's the ultimate freedom.

UtopianPragmatist

Yeah i can certainly see the idea of a 'primer' taking off, certainly as modules - when a community needs a school or medical facility they simply get a primer package suitable for their environment and resource budget and follow the instructions. At some point it'll probably be as simple as assemble some tools to auto-make an inventory of parts then assemble them into the desired structure.

Of course the sheer number of options will at some point become a confusing factor itself and no doubt 'distributions' and 'repositories' much like the current linux ones will develop; ones that focus on 'diy for normal people' and those with all the newest things or the most stable things, i picture a strange new world where people have rooms set as 'lab space' for complex experiments or established in artistic themes for special purposes.

I know so many people who now have music studios set up in the house or garage, this is only possible because of the software advances - it surely won't be too long before it becomes a norm for music makers rather than a rarity, same for many other 'hobbies' at the moment for example most people can't simply get a micro-brew going in their spare room / shed without learning a lot of unrelated stuff but as plans and designs get shared it's growing in popularity and scope, soon fully monitored and automated production methods will be as easy to install and dabble with as putting up shelves and plugging in a modem. It won't just be about picking up a package and wondering into the wilderness, it'll be about picking up a primer and changing your life where you stand.

Instead of being stuck in a poverty trap where everything is out of reach and you can't afford to try anything new or spend time developing as a person because the treadmill is running so darn quick the other way soon the majority of the planet might actually have a chance to really define themselves rather than be defined by their economic position.

Well i hope so because we're running out of places to wonder off to :)

Danial

As I was looking over the GVCS yesterday I realized that there is no machines regarding the production of paper, one of the basic materials for a great many things we use.

I love the idea of a primer. The program itself could be as complex or simplistic as needed. Starting out as a very large encyclopedia and ending up as an adaptive program that changes its instructions based on the available resources and tools.

Matt_Maier

Ah, that's nothing. It's got a bakery oven but doesn't have a flour mill. Can you imagine a more basic machine for a small village than a flour mill? Some of the oldest tools ever discovered are stone wheels for grinding grain.

Seems like a paper mill would be more like a facility than a machine. Of course the GVCS already has that problem with a couple of the "machines" listed on it. Oh well. One step at a time.

danielravennest

Guess who just added a section for downloadable plans and 3D printer files? Pirate Bay Physibles

There is a description of what the new category is intended for here. Perhaps we should put a torrent of the OSE DVD on there, once it's in decent shape? (It's still pretty ragged as a document, I would not put something so unfinished on a public site yet)

UtopianPragmatist

haha but in fairness to the lack of mill, it's not like the world is short of open designs for a flour mill - i'm pretty sure the patent limit is up on most of them :)

Matt_Maier

To be fair to my snide jab, I'm pretty sure oven design is also about as "open" as something can get. :D

Danial

I think there are a great many things that could be included in the GVCS that are not there, many of them probably out of patent. What is still needed is instructions on how to make them. An oven or flour mill may be out of patent, but the designs are of no use if there are no instructions on how to build them. Old technology is nicer to open source in many ways because you can simply create an instruction set for each generation or level of the technology. This would really help from a bootstrapping point of view. A rudimentary flour mill could be two stone working against each other where as a high tech mill could be completely automated. It all depends on your available resources.

Howdy, Stranger!

Categories

In this Discussion

Open Source Ecology Forums