Will’s One Month Report
So I’ve been here at Factor e Farm for 1 month. I am living and breathing the Open Source Ecology lifestyle and working on different projects. When I arrived at the start of May I had a little Q&A session with Marcin to talk about ideas, visions...
Induction Furnace Controller
Darren Vandervort, founder of the Open Capitalist open source product development platform, has joined us on the Open Source Induction Furnace (OSIF) project. We are using Open+Pario for project development. He volunteered to become project leader for...
Pressing Rate Maxed Out at 16 Bricks Per Minute
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...
Initial CEB Field Testing Report – The Liberator Beta v2.0
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...
PowerCube on LifeTrac
A universal mechanical power source is one of the key components of the Global Village Construction Set – the set of building blocks for creating resilient communities. The basic concept is that instead of using a dedicated engine on a particular...
The Liberator Beta 2.0: Machine Overview
Things are looking up on the fully automatic, open source, CEB press – The Liberator Beta v2.0. We finally have the machine ready to run in field tests. The basic operational description is here, from the front: and from the back: Some noteworthy...
13 Bricks Per Minute… and Counting
Today’s goal was to determine maximum pressing rates attainable with The Liberator, the open source CEB press. We obtained data to verify some of the predicted rates shown in italics in this table. To boost morale, we started by pressing thin, 2...
CEB Automation with Sensors
For the last two months, we’ve been developing and implementing Prototype 2 automatic controls for the open source Compressed Eearth Brick (CEB) press. We had initial results from Prototype 1 controls, without sensors, back in November. This time,...
GVCS Project Timeline and Scalability
How long will it take to develop the Global Village Construction Set? It depends. It depends on the level of support that the project is able to attract. The toughest part of gathering support is explaining the project so that people wrap their head around...
Masonry
William took a course on brick laying last week back in the UK, in preparation for the CEB construction adventures of Solar Village 2010 this year at Factor e Farm. Here is some documentation from his course:
