Archive for September, 2008
Monday, September 29th, 2008
Babington Burner Trial One
Today we started to put together our Babington burner. This burner is important because it is a versatile source of heat for: space heating, metal melting, glassworks, pottery, steam engines for remote power, heat engines for mobile power in cars and tractors, and many others. We can use it with any waste oil – …
10 Comments » - Posted in Babington Burner,Challenges,Open Engineering by Marcin
Monday, September 29th, 2008
Hexayurt Construction
Hexayurt building went well – a 7/16″ Oriented Strand Board (OSB) structure with 4 inch wide, 32 gage galvanized flashing as the ‘tape’ to hold it together. Being familiar with standard construction methods, I had my doubts concerning the structural integrity of a tension srtucture. I have been converted after this project.
The opposing walls …
23 Comments » - Posted in Construction by Bob
Saturday, September 27th, 2008
Progress
Ecology and technology. The tractor is borne of plants and rock – transformed to rubber and steel.
It’s munching up the soil – with the tiller. It is site preparation for the first Hexayurt – in minutes as opposed to 2 days with 3 people with heavy hoe by hand. We are on …
2 Comments » - Posted in Agroecotechnology,Construction,Crowdsource Funding by Marcin
Thursday, September 25th, 2008
Crowdsource Funding
We finally kicked off our crowdsource funding yesterday – or online donations. You can chip in to our project here.
We are migrating towards full direct support by such small online donations. The bottom line is – with the collected resources, we plan on delivering:
This is within the context of our 6 month technology tree …
3 Comments » - Posted in Crowdsource Funding by Marcin
Monday, September 22nd, 2008
Factor e Live – Episode 9 – Rototiller, More Solar Panels, Biodiesel Reactor + Crowdsource Funding
Here is the continuing saga with the open source tractor. We built a quick attach plate for rapid interchanging of implements. We built an open source rototiller as the first such implement. Now we can switch readily between the tiller and loader bucket – as needed for CEB construction.
We also show how we put …
8 Comments » - Posted in Accomplishments,Collaborators,Construction,Crowdsource Funding,Digital Fabrication by Marcin
Monday, September 8th, 2008
Clarifying OSE Vision
Vinay published his vision for Global Swadeshi recently – a movement where individuals take personal responsibility for global issues. Key among these issues is oppression – whether it’s the oppression of the weak or funding one’s own oppression by The Matrix in the industrialized world.
Here we clarify what OSE, and its experimental facility, Factor …
2 Comments » - Posted in Education,Open Source Ecology,People by Marcin
Sunday, September 7th, 2008
CEB Stabilization Questions
We are getting much closer to full-scale building with the CEB – with September 15 as our starting date. Another collaborator will arrive here around that date, Alex Rollin – which is extremely exciting becuase he is also an information architect, organizer and integral thinker – so we’ll be likely to double the organizational …
12 Comments » - Posted in Collaborators,Construction by Marcin
Friday, September 5th, 2008
The Bell Tolls for PV
- Guest post by Benjamin Gatti from our Solar Turbine Google Group.
This post features an eye-opening perspective on photovoltaic (PV) panels. The claim is: it is very unlikely that PV will ever be cheap. Personally, I’ve been following PV since 1995. I’ve heard predictions to the tune of “$1/watt PV panels coming out next …
14 Comments » - Posted in Guests,Open Source Economic Development,Solar Energy,Solar Turbine by Marcin
Friday, September 5th, 2008
LifeTrac Prototype I
Here is the evolution of LifeTrac (see wiki work page) from design, possibly the most simple implementation of tractor-loader functions:
to steel frame:
to wheels and motor,
and to bucket:
I completed the quick attach plate yesterday, from design:
to fabrication:
The plate mounts on the front end loader arms, instead of the bucket, and is based on similar designs …
14 Comments » - Posted in LifeTrac by Marcin
Thursday, September 4th, 2008
Solar Turbine – Commentary on Results
Friends, the latest developments on the Solar Turbine project, outside of the documentation clips in Factor e Live 6 and Factor e Live 7, are ambitious. We are presently leaning to mirrors and a modern, high-recirculation ratio uniflow steam engine as the heat engine of choice. The long-term motivation for the latter is to …
