Open Source Ecology

Construction should start at Factor e Farm on about September 1. Out of nowhere, one of our readers from Germany produced this 3D walk-through of the CEB house that Will and I drew up in Qcad in 2D:

The 3D walkthrough is this:

Solar Village 2010 in 3D from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

Sound track credit – Mind Field by DJ Blue. Game engine editor used was Sauerbraten.

This led to a very interesting discussion regarding reality and virtual reality, and how massive multiplayer online gaming – believe it or not – could help save the world? (more…)

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Fabrication optimization for The Liberator open source CEB press involves designing and deploying four, heavy duty, open source fabrication tools: (1) drill press for drilling 1″ and larger holes directly in metal without pre-drilling; (2) 120 ton hole puncher/ironworker for punching up to 1.5″ holes in 1″ thick metal, and shearing up to 12″ wide slabs of 1″ thick steel; (3) torch table for cutting meta via computer control; and (4) heavy duty lathe for making motor couplers. The reason for the above developments is a significant reduction in fabrication time – such as a second to punch a 1/2″ hole in The Liberator frame, as opposed to a  minute required for drilling. And, where we do have to drill 1/2″ holes, the time is reduced by avoiding switching of drill bits for pre-drilling of starter holes.

We have completed the initial prototype of the heavy duty, open source drill press. We are glad to report encouraging results, and a good addition to RepLab – the open source Fab Lab. It contains a hydraulic motor for the drilling and a hydraulic cylinder for the down pressure – so this is a literal press, and it is not short on torque or power as the motor can sustain up to 20 hp. We are using our Universal Rotor for the motor. This same rotor was already used for the lathe, tree auger (report forthcoming), and honey extractor (report forthcoming) – as it’s part of our LifeTrac infrastructure. This is part of our modularity concept in action – a key feature of the Global Village Construction Set.

You can see our wiki work page for the design and bill of materials, and the .dxf design file is at the Open+Pario repository. See the video of the build with explanation, plus  demonstration of drilling a 1″ hole, without pre-drilling, in a 1″ steel slab. The workshop fireworks are extra, as we just passed the Fourth of July in these united States.

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Sean is here for a part of the summer to gather footage for his documentary on the beginnings of Factor e Farm. The time lapses in the last blog post are also part of his work. Here is a 3 minute video about Factor e Farm and The Liberator open source CEB press.

We are planning on putting together a powerful documentary on the core message of OSE – distilling key concepts and filling in with our work as the evoloving substance. We feel that our message is still poorly communicated, largely because we are too busy at work creating the substance to make the message compelling. We may not get around to this documentary until we complete the tractor prototype II, soil pulverizer prototype II, torch table, hole puncher, drill press, and lathe – all open source, of course. The constructions/fabrication that we’ll do with these tools should complete the package of initial results on the Global Village/Resilient Community Construction Set – such that we’ll have plenty of compelling material for an interesting video. We’ll see when we get around to it. In the meantime, if you want to see our work go faster, subscribe to the True Fans.

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We are pleased to announce the official, Full Product Release of The Liberator, the high-performance, open source, Compressed Earth Brick (CEB) press. We are releasing it under the OSE License for post-scarcity economics, and we are now taking orders. You can see the plans here.

Full Product Release indicates that the design is sufficiently mature for widespread replication, based on proven functionality and performance of the designs provided. Improvements may be made, but it is not critical for Factor e Farm to lead this effort. The design is sufficient for us to now focus on developing the next products in line – namely the open source tractor, LifeTrac, PowerCube, and others.

We are offering the fully automatic version of The Liberator with 6 foot wide hopper and hopper vibrator for US$8k, FOB at Factor e Farm, Kansas City area, USA. This machine can produce up to 16 bricks per minute. We are offering the manually-controlled version, The Liberator-M, with a small hopper, for US$5k. This machine may produce 5-8 bricks per minute, depending on the dexterity of the operator and the power source. The design of the manual machine is identical to the fully automatic version, minus the large hopper, vibrator, sensors, controller, and solenoid valves. It may be upgraded to the fully automatic version by retrofitting the missing components. Note that our machines do not include the power source, as they can be plugged into any source of hydraulic power. We achieved 16 bricks per minute with a hydraulic power source of 24 gallons per minute. The next competitors with a machine of comparable soil throughput appear to be priced between $45k (Powell and Sons) and $65k (AECT). You can see our full product description and features here. Our price is subject to change, and we have the present capacity to produce 4 machines at one time, with on-demand fabrication lead time of 3 weeks. If you are interested in building with CEBs this season, you may want to consider ordering a machine now. Email us.

(more…)

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Here is a 30 second video showing how we crate up the CEB press for shipping, which we dismantled two posts ago.

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One of the features of The Liberator open source CEB press is that it is designed for disassembly. Here we show how we take the machine apart in a couple of hours, down to the main frame section and all other parts. It flattens from 83 inches of height to about a 1 foot high package.

(Sound track produced by one of our True Fans)

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Our compressive strength tests have revealed that we could, in principle, build a 795 foot high wall with our unstabilized compressed earth blocks. Here’s how we arrived at this.

Prototype I of The Liberator lay gathering dust for over a year after it served its initial purpose. We have converted it into a 20 ton shop press, and used it for testing the compressive strength of the blocks produced by the The Liberator Beta v2.0.

We obtained 795 psi as the maximum compressive strength for unstabilized blocks made from on-site soil, and over 1200 PSI for blocks made from reject lime stabilized with 10% Portland cement by volume. The latter cured for 2 days only. For comparison, building code requirements are 300 psi compressive strength for earthen construction. Here are some of the results:

(more…)

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The field testing of The Liberator Beta v2.0 is complete. If you look back at the 8-12 brick per minute goals in the last link, you’ll observe that we surpassed this with 13-16 bricks per minute in practice. I love it when a plan comes together. This deserves a veritable press release, no pun intended.

We will report on compressive strength tests for stabilized and unstabilized bricks in the next blog post, and then we’re ready to ship our first product to Maureen. As one of the last tests, we demonstrate here that The Liberator, about 1600 lb of weight, fits on the back of a 1/2 ton pickup truck. One would probably want to use a larger pickup truck because of the weight, and take off the hopper in traveling so that the center of mass is lowered. The machine is design-for-disassembly, and today, we’ll begin packing it – so it will turn into a package about 2 feet high on a 3′x6′ pallet.

In the picture above, the legs are placed in the inner mounting position, 4 feet apart. During brick pressing, the legs are moved into the outer position for added stability at 6 foot separation.

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Speed trials on our automatic, open source CEB press, The Liberator, are complete. We achieved a maximum brick pressing rate of 16 bricks per minute, or less than 3 seconds per brick. We have run sufficient tests and worked out the bugs in the control scheme, and the results are as optimistic as predicted. After optimization-modifications of the CEB controls and control code, we have gained several bricks per minute in performance – primarily because of running the two hydraulic cylinders contemporaneously, as opposed to sequentially. We predicted this based on initial results from over a week ago. Here we show a half-minute video demonstrating the furious speeds achieved. We are pressing 2.5″x6″x12″ bricks in the first part of the clip, and 3.5″x6″x12″ bricks in the second part – with rates of 16 and 13 bricks per minute, respectively. The power source is LifeTrac at 24 gallons per minute of hydraulic flow:

Read more about these results and control strategy. (more…)

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It was raining for a week straight, and this Thursday, we finally documented initial field operations with our open source CEB press – The Liberator Beta v2.0. We used the soil pulverizer to pulverize the soil, and we used the tooth-bar bucket to load the machine:

The run shown displays a pressing rate of 11 bricks per minute, using LifeTrac on medium-high throttle as the power source. These encouraging results also pointed to the need of certain adjustments for control optimization. These changes should allow us to achieve about 2-5 pressing rate improvement over the above result, and they should also allow for easier adjustment of brick size and of brick compression. (more…)

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