Open Source Ecology

William Cleaver will be joining us at Factor e Farm on May 1 for a Dedicated Project Visit. He’s coming from across the big pond – from the United Kingdom – and we are planning for a 3 month stay.

William is not a novice to creative dexterity – he’s involved in repair and demolition of industrial chimney stacks and natural draught cooling towers – at heights. See for yourself:

He has experience with various tools, welding brickwork, ropework, woodwork, and general shop.  He’s traveled the world, studied Romance languages, taught English in Chile, and is certified to teach high ropes courses. He is now showing great interest in the deeper message of post-scarcity, resilient community creation.

We discussed the following tentative plan, with both of us working in the shop and as needed:

May – Work on finishing or building Sawmill/LifeTrac II/MicroTrac II/ anciliary implements for construction – all in preparation for building.

June – begin building autonomous, zero energy housing with solar space. Experiment with CEB floors, CEB masonry stove and chimney, stabilized bricks, stabilized reject lime bricks, stabilized brick walkway and driveway, stabilized retaining walls, and others. We plan on winter food garden and sprouting in the solar space. If progress on the steam engine goes well, we’ll aim to install combined heat and power on the masonry stove.

July – continue building until comfortable accommodations for the winter are ready for several people.

We’re looking at building zero energy homes that look tentatively like this:

(Credits: Aigars Bruvelis in Blender)

Here is a CEB floor example from Abe at Vela Creations:

See more of his photos here.

Other than this, William is learning Kdenlive on Linux for movie editing, as well as and QCad for CAD work. These are staple tools now at Factor e Farm. William will begin preparing some of the technical drawings for the sawmill, so we can collaborate on making that happen over distance until his arrival.

We do want to consider bringing in additional help from the CEB general contractor, Floyd (see last blog post). We will consider hosting a CEB workshop if progress is good. If the CEB fabrication is going well – there could be resources generated to really get things moving forward, and continue to build more structures. I think now is the beginning of really settling into the land – and getting the place to look half-way presentable. We’re open to all kinds of ideas, such as the proposed CEB vault construction and others – but we’d need other people to get involved to push those projects forward. Otherwise, we’re sticking to basics and all types of experiments in the process.

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It turns out that there’s a CEB contractor by Lathrop, Missouri – which is  within 30 miles from us. Meet Floyd Hagerman, who has built a couple of very interesting CEB houses. The first one shown here is a hybrid – or a combination of CEB and standard construction. It has a Trombe wall – meaning a South-facing CEB wall, painted black, and glazed over. The wall serves as a thermal collector – and its performance is impressive. Last winter, before anyone moved in, the house remained above 40 degrees Fahrenheit all winter – Zone 5 continental climate – with no supplemental heating! Here’s a look.

Here is an example of DIY concrete blocks that Floyd pressed with his machine, by adding about 2% cement. Floyd used reject lime from the quarry, mixed in the stabilizer – and made an external retaining wall:

This was only 3 shovels of cement for over 1000 pounds of reject lime. So we are seeing the feasibility of stabilized blocks for outside use, especially if we add more stabilizer. Sealing the surface with stone sealer or similar cover would finish the job for complete stabilization from the elements.

With LifeTrac, we could throw a bag of cement in front of the soil pulverizer as we work the soil (80 lb for a 1000 lb load of soil, for 8% stabilization), and we would mix and load the soil in one step – ready to be used in The Liberator. We plan on using stabilized brick for walkways, base courses in buildings, and we are considering the possibility for building a driveway paved with brick.

Here is Floyd’s machine – a Powell and Sons version at $15k for up to 6 brick per minute pressing rates:

Here Floyd discusses the feasibility of building with CEB as a contractor – based on his experience. The big question is, does it work? How much would a CEB house end up costing? Here are some interesting insights:

On the open enterprise front, the field is rich for incubating a number of open source CEB entrepreneurs. Anybody out there considering CEB contracting?

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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.

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Here are the initial CAD drawings for the CEB press, The Liberator Beta v2.0. You can download these drawing interchange format (dxf) files at the Open+Pario project repository. You can view dxf files with QCad, AutoCAD, Lx-Viewer, or many other applications. Note that this is work in progress, and the drawings will be updated as time goes on. New files will appear at the repository as soon as they are available.

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Currently, we are still working on getting our first order of The Liberator high performance, open source, Compressed Earth Brick (CEB) press out the door. We are now upgrading the automatic controls.

We have published a technical paper on the automation problem statement. We are managing the project at the Open+Pario project management site, where you can download a copy of this paper under the Documents tab. The paper outlines the technical issues surrounding effective automation, based on our previous results. It provides the necessary background if you want to collaborate on the project or build upon it – in the name of open source development. Here is the abstract:

Abstract: There are several considerations for the successful implementation of automatic controls on The Liberator^*, the world’s first, high performance, open source, Compressed Earth Brick (CEB) press. Considerations include: (1), brick production work flow design; (2), simplicity of control logic; (3), brick thickness adjustability and uniformity; (4), modular, lifetime design; (5), performance optimization; (6), cost, (7), interchangeability of hydraulic power units¹; (8) open source standards; and (9), simple user interface. This technical paper documents these issues for the development team and the greater community as part of the open source process. The greater context for this work is promoting the creation of post-scarcity, resilient communities. This paper promotes the greater context by contributing to the solution of one of the most basic needs of humanity – housing – under the assumption that earth construction is the most robust and most widely-used method of housing worldwide². Revisions of this work are found at Open+Pario³. (more…)

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From post-scarcity communities, open business models, open source tractors, land stewardship, to starting some serious building this year – here’s the latest:

If you are liking what you heard in the video, don’t forget to subscribe to the True Fans to help make the work happen sooner rather than later.

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We have our first sale of The Liberator CEB press. Maureen, one of our True Fans, will get her hands on an automated version of The Liberator – The Liberator Beta v2.0. We are expecting 8-12 bricks per minute for this machine. We’ve also discussed collaborating on hands-on CEB construction workshops – which is especially attractive for a machine of this caliber. Thus, Maureen is both a supporter and co-developer of the CEB enterprise.

This marks a historic moment for free enterprise development (see last post for what we mean by free enterprise). To my knowledge, we are demonstrating the first case of free enterprise in the world for high-performance, economically-significant, modern technology. If you know of others, please let us know – and we’ll be quick to collaborate and push forward the frontiers of post-scarcity economics.
(more…)

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Abstract: We have achieved product release of a manually-controlled, high-performance, hydraulic Compresssed Eearth Brick (CEB) press, The Liberator. The initial version is selling for  $3500 – $5500. Our present state of development is automation, which will increase the brick production rate from a maximum of 4-5 bricks/min in the manual version to 8-12 bricks/min in the automatic version. Initial tests with an Arduino-based automatic controller have been performed using small solenoid valves (10 gpm), and higher throughput (25 gpm) hydraulic valves are the next step. We are looking for collaborators to assist in business development according to the principles of free hardware. The business model itself will be free – as in free to examine, use, modify, and distribute without restriction – and modifications must also be made likewise available. Key to maintaining freedom of the enterprise is addressing patent issues by open publishing in trade journals and other venues – for enforceability of freedom of the CEB press. Business development involves fabrication optimization, open source tooling development, machine testing, marketing, development of design/fabrication drawings and design repository, recruiting of a developer community, web development, and production/sales contracts development.

The term free enterprise that is used by mainstream economics really means monopoly capitalism. This is far from the definition proposed by Jefferson and other seminal thinkers on the topic. It is also the opposite of the way we use this term at Factor e Farm and in the Free Software/Hardware movement in general. (more…)

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Subtitled: Fabrication Optimization.

We are positioning The Liberator as the world’s best, free (libre) CEB press. We are also positioning it as the world’s best CEB press – meaning that the proprietary counterparts will have a serious contender. For this to happen, it is critical that The Liberator gets out to the world as free hardware. It is also critical that its fabrication procedure is optimized and open-sourced  – for a few reasons:

• Post-scarcity resilient communities rely on effective production. This is one tool that gets us there.
• The Liberator is the perfect case for an open source business model (read this analysis published by Steve Bosserman over a year ago when the initial prototype was released). Here is what we propose to those involved deeply in open hardware and open-everything development. We propose to collaborate with a global developer community to compose a pool of open design that we can fabricate locally – today. By sharing design, we can produce and earn locally – to fund all of our projects. Our goal for The Liberator is reducing fabrication time to 20 hours per machine – so that you and I can enjoy healthy earnings from the value of labor at $50-200/hour, while still coming in at 10x or so lower cost than the non-free competition. We bring The Liberator to the table today. What do you have? Email us and let’s work together. This ties in to RepLab – as optimized production requires low cost access to tooling.
• Free (libre) hardware and infrastructure is the only route to post-scarcity. Free implies transformative.

Let’s dive in to optimization. Start with a few videos on the hardware. A brick is spit out forcefully from the machine:

Brick on LifeTrac Power from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

Here I discuss some points after the local fabrication shop professionals stopped over for a chat. (more…)

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The FSCONS conference was awesome, discussion on RepLab is evolving, and I have a feeling we haven’t seen anything yet. At the same time – the core of building a pattern for replicable, post-scarcity, resilient communities is actually building it. Today we get back to the CEB automation question – and we present encouraging initial results.

The summary of results to date and calculated predictions is captured in this brick production rate table, featuring manual and automatic control runs for The Liberator Compressed Earth Brick (CEB) Press.

At about 9 bricks/minute realized (second result) and 12-18 bricks per minute calculated, this is very encouraging. I haven’t found any 12 brick per minute machines for less than $50k. It looks like a factor of 10 in cost reduction for us. This sets the mind spinning on prospects of open source enterprise replication, and transformative economics resulting from this.

Explanations of the table are found below. Here is a 1 minute video showing the automated motion of the machine – performed without soil for testing purposes, demonstrating the 6 brick per minute result in the table above. Look, mom – no hands:

Click To Play

Here are further details of the entire Arduino-controlled setup.
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