Open Engineering


We have proposed the scalable, Open Source Product Development Pipeline methodology over a year ago. It’s merely a formalization of an actual process, which was not high.

What are the challenges to a scalable, open product development methodology – which has the power to transform the entire globe to an open economic system – within a few years, if not months? Open-sourcing the entire economy is a well-bounded problem, if done collaboratively. (more…)

Categories: Collaboration Platform, Open Collaboration, Open Engineering, Open Source Product Development Pipeline

[11] Comments

OSE is teaming up with Gaia University to offer Ph.D. programs related to post-scarcity, resilient communities. As you may have read in a previous post, Gaia University is beginning its Ph.D. program offerings this year.

The OSE-Gaia program is geared at developing the rigorous theory and practice necessary to support the development of post-scarcity economics. The goal of the Ph.D. offerings is to set new ground in interdisiciplinary studies, by offering projects that combine academic rigor and hands-on experience. Factor e Farm is a working lab that can be used for this purpose.

Gaia University is not the only route for you to get involved if you are interested in charting new territory in applied studies. If you are considering post-graduate studies, and if you are savvy, you can arrange to define your own program even if you are at a traditional university. You would have to find a professor at that university willing to be your academic liaison, and you would have to convince your institution that your proposed undertaking merits an advanced degree. Details of these arrangements depend on the university – and if you are enterprising, you can definitely arrange a workable scenario. I don’t think schools typically advertise this option too much, but it certainly exists. I would have done that myself, if I were aware of the possibility.

Here are 5 Ph.D. program statements as immediate offerings – for those brave pioneers who want a real, interdisciplinary challenge. The topic areas are allied closely with the work of OSE, and Gaia University will be providing the organizational infrastructure and promotion of these programs to its prospective students. (more…)

Categories: Education, Global Village Construction Set, Open Collaboration, Open Engineering, Open Everything, Ph.D. Programs, Proposals, Viral Village

[3] Comments

We are now officially using Open+Pario as our project management and design repository for Open Source Ecology. The most active project at present is the CEB press, and we are beginning project management of the Open Source Induction Furnace. Anybody can view any of the projects – including design files, technical discussions, etc. The content is entirely transparent and open to the greater community.

If you want to get involved in any of the projects,  you can  sign up  as a Project Member by registering and joining  a given project. (more…)

Categories: Collaboration Platform, Documentation, Education, Global Swadeshi, Global Village Construction Set, Information Architecture, Infrastructure, Open Collaboration, Open Engineering, Open Everything, Open Source Ecology, Open Source Economic Development, Open Source Product Development Pipeline, People, Post-scarcity, Viral Village

[2] Comments

Hats off to our collaborators from Poland for open-sourcing a manual, dual-block CEB press. It is in the pre-alpha v0.1 release stage.

Open Source MANUAL CEB PRESS beta I from Cohabitat Platform on Vimeo.

You can download the existing CAD files here. The files are in Polish, so they still need to be translated for the broader audience.

Meet your developers from the Co-Habitat Platform: Pawel Sroczynski and Remik Karbowiak. These guys are pretty good. They also developed a model open source, prefab, straw-bale house design, and they will be buildng it this year at a budget of $7k. I always thought that straw bale is too exotic in practice because of the huge labor requirements, but these guys are showing otherwise with OpenSTRAW:

Here is the building sequence. Click on the following images to enlarge:


Both the manual CEB press and the straw bale work are a major contribution to open source economic development – and to humanity. See their website for more information.  Congratulations to the Co-Habitat team. We’d like to add the manual CEB press to the Factor e Farm product line as soon as the machine is tested in the field, and we may end up building some straw bale here after all.

Categories: Bale Spike, CAD, Collaborators, Compressed Earth Block Press, Documentation, Education, Free Business Models, Infrastructure, Open Collaboration, Open Engineering, Open Source Economic Development, Post-scarcity

[6] Comments

MicroTrac achieved zero turn motion. If one walks around rapidly, one can turn the walk-behind tractor around in place. MicroTrac is turning out to be a beautiful freak:

To do this, we added two small, freely-turning wheels to MicroTrac. This replaced the rigid wheels from the first test run. In that test run, we discovered that we want a greater degree of turning flexibility, because MicroTrac is so long – hence the zero turn wheels. (more…)

Categories: Abundance, Diet, Farm Equipment, LifeTrac, Local Food Systems, MicroTrac, Open Engineering, Open Source Nursery, Open Source Tiller, Permaculture

[7] Comments

How does one reinvent corporate R&D by using open source methods? We missed a couple of details in yesterday’s hairy diagram and explanation. Now it should all be clear:

Now a couple of words on the above. (more…)

Categories: Open Collaboration, Open Engineering, Open Source Economic Development, Open Source Product Development Pipeline, Viral Village

[5] Comments

Yesterday, Mathew, Nick, Jeremy and I participated in the conference call on extending our collaboration ability. One major issue that we face is the large scope and difficulty of explaining the process of building the world’s first, replicable, off-grid Global Village, via the Global Village Construction Set.

We made 2 conclusions in the conference call.

  1. We are going to focus all of our energy on just the CEB press for now, because we can demonstrate the complete Product Development Cycle by example only. We can’t explain the product cycle – because we don’t even know ourselves what it is until we go all the way through Product Release.
  2. To help others understand the integrated ecology of the Global Village Construction Set, we’ll start moving on to ecological diagrams of operations, and how the different technologies fit in that ecology. The first diagram is the Solar Energy Cycle. You can see the rough sketch.

We have updated the Global Village Construction Set – so read about the changes that have been made. The same functionality still exists, with minor refinements and simplifications in the way we present the entire package. Still, we make the bold claim that the set, along with a few other readily-accessible technologies – is sufficient to provide an infrastructure for advanced civilization. The items mentioned in the GVCS constitute a package of items that are currently not open source or replicable, therefore fraught with high costs – such that creating a replicable global village from existing components is difficult and expensive, if not impossible, in practice.

Here is the updated Set:

And here is the set rewritten in pictures:

From now on, I shall toil you less with diagrams of words, and more with diagrams of pictures. While we have already shown a simple set of component icons for an open source technology pattern language, we’re going further with pattern language concepts to explain the individual, integrated technologies. We’re moving from components more to integrated technologies, and from the integrated technologies to ecologies thereof. Different infrastructures and ecologies, such as solar power infrastructure, fabrication ecology, or waste resource cycles – may be explained now by using icons.

I have to go now and write my Oekonux 4 presentation (coming up next weekend in Manchester, UK) using some of these icons. If you are interested in meeting up during the conference, let me know as well.

Categories: Open Collaboration, Open Engineering, Pattern Language

1 Comment

We have previously introduced an open collaborative product development process. Developing an effective open source product pipeline – as a worthy competitor to corporate research and development (R&D) – remains one of the hottest topics of the peer-to-peer economy. We know of no other comprehensive product development pipelines, with well-defined, applied methodology – outside of our own. That’s sad but true, and we welcome insight if we’re missing something here.

We have begun a process to get to world-class, open product R&D with the Global Village Construction Set – a set of infrastructure technologies for building the world’s first, replicable, off-grid, open source Global Village.

This process is in its infancy. The problem statement of reinventing the essence of civilization is not a light task. It’s a topic equivalent to hundreds of Ph.D. theses, combined with the hands-on work of thousands – nothing short of a social movement. It’s a social technology and process that massages existing technology into a more human-friendly form – also in harmony with natural life support systems. To us at Factor e Farm – developing an effective process for collaborative product development – is the most pressing issue that society faces today. That is because it is a tactical approach whereby people actually share. This concept has been discussed previously in scripture, pick your book. (more…)

Categories: Open Collaboration, Open Engineering

[19] Comments

We’ve returned to the torch table after a long hiatus since the December 9 blog post
on the topic. CEB press digital fabrication is the goal. My goal is to spend noon to six PM every day until the thing is built. Here are some 3D pictures, which you can also see on the wiki torch table development page. The annotated description and the project log are on the wiki as well. 3D design is in open source Blender, by Jeremy. Comments on this are welcome. I’m sending this out for review now, and you can keep up with evolution at the wiki.

(more…)

Categories: Open Engineering, Permafacture, Torch Table

1 Comment

I’m in the process of designing a simple 3kW steam engine for both a combined heat-and-power gasifier system and our solar power generator system. I can’t help but think about the future possibility of small-scale steam power for both stationary and mobile steam power applications.

In absence of a really suitable open source 3D CAD program, I downloaded a free trial version of Alibre Design Xpress 3D solid modeling software – to do a basic 3D model of the engine we’re building, for which we have a $250 bill of materials:

The basic concept is – as mentioned in a previous post – a high performance modern steam engine of 20% efficiency can be made without much technical difficulty. Remember that our present solar turbine design requires only 5% efficiency to become feasible.

Moreover, a simple direct coupling of the steam engine to a linear hydraulic pump -

means that you have a super-simple hydraulic power source for devices like our open source tractor, LifeTrac. This brings LifeTrac much closer to the reality of being powered by high performance, modern steam – via local production. As such, LifeTrac would become integrated into the local agricultural ecology – capable of being powered by a gasifier or pyrolysis oil from local biomass.

Now I’m busy on the standard steam engine of the 3D drawing above – so if you want to see the latter hydraulic pump hybrid come to reality sooner rather than later – contact us right now and let’s start talking about fabrication. By the way, there is a resurgence of interest in such hydraulic drive in the mainstream economy. (more…)

Categories: Biofuels, Open Engineering, Open Source Economic Development, Open Source Technology, Solar Energy

[17] Comments

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