The official trifold brochure for Open Source Ecology is now available:
You can download this in GIMP or Photoshop and jpg format. There are 2 pages, front and back. If you are printing these, make sure that you use the Rockwell font, which is also included in the download.
As you may see in the trifold, we have now reached the 300 True Fan Mark:
As of today, our actual number is 311. So if you like to see this work continue exploding, you can commit to $10 or more per month by subscribing:
Our numbers are showing explosive growth, and there are large numbers of technical contributors continuing to join the project, especially after my TED Talk. We are also joining efforts with Solar Fire – the open source solar concentrator project. Now this is just too much good news for one day, so I will dedicate tomorrow’s blog post to this exciting development. Thanks to Isaiah for producing the trifold – another great job by our Media Director. Isaiah is the key player behind the scenes who is helping to set new standards with our media presence, such as his direction on my TED Talk. Isaiah will also be organizing the marketing campaign for the Solar Microfactory and Nanohabitat Kickstarter event. We expect this to be yet another hit, even larger that the Solar Fire collaboration. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, print a few brochures and pass them out to your friends. Help us spread the word and recruit more True Fans and technical contributors. We want to print some of these brochures ourselves, so if you have a spare color printer and you can donate it to us, please email me at opensourceecology at gmail dot com.
Our main need right now is a full-time project manager – someone with Systems Engineering and Management experience who can assist in the technological integration work. I can handle managing about 12 projects at a time of the 50 total. We are also looking for more fabricators to join us at Factor e Farm – to help in the production run, and liberate my time for more of the technical development work. We are serious about setting new standards as a Distributive Enterprise – and we are calling out for others to adopt the same practice.
Awesome, that brochure is exactly what I needed. Thank you so much!
Something is wrong with the Rockwell font inside the zip file. It has 0Kb. Can you please fix that and upload it again? Thanks
Excellent! Beautiful work Isaiah.
Awesome, I ony wish I had the expertise time and money to contribute now, but I have set reminders for when I do.
I noticed the solar fire thing is currently (though it may well and hopefully improve) 400 bucks per peak KW thermal, so after conversion to electricity it is pretty close to cheap solar panels.
I have up on my blog an idea here for using solar panels with variable concentration ratio collector. I know, it would be very hard to make solar panels so that may make it unacceptable there, but I thought you might be interested. My by calculations through the spreadsheet there indicate that the cost of the Wh per day harvested can go down greatly with variable concentration ratio collectors because during periods of low sunlight you can increase the ratio, while decreasing it during sunny periods to avoid overheating the panels.
Whatever solution you go with I highly recommend using the spreadsheet approach to estimate the performance because it can vary so much from what you might think. also see the System advisor model I mention, it has functions for the simulation of solar thermal collectors.
I worked for many years as a Systems Engineer for Boeing, and am now retired. I have started putting some pages together on the subject in the wiki:
http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Systems_Engineering
It’s very preliminary, but I intend to keep working on it.
Very useful. If we work out the Functional Block Diagrams for the Systems Architecture of the GVCS project, we will be well on our way to defining explicit tasks – which is half the journey to the solutions.
after printing a few, I realized that this is not a home printer ‘friendly’ version. It eats up too much ink. Could Isaiah (or anyone else) design one that is more individually efficient to print? The black and white option does not do this job justice.
Hello, I have been reading about factorefarm, OSE etc. and watching some of the videos on your youtube channel. I have something I feel you really need to know.
When I lived in a different house with a basement where I could do all kinds of cool things like electronics hobbyist stuff (including making circuit boards) I had lead batteries and lead solder around. I wasn’t careful with it at all. I had heard lead was toxic, but lots of stuff is, and the warning label on the products that contain it seems pretty muted. Indeed the warning on the solder flux due to the ammonium chloride is more ominous than on the lead solder.
But I heard it was neurotoxic. I’d heard about lead paint and the problems it had. So I decided to look into the toxicity at some point just to be doubly sure. This is what I found:
-The half life of lead in blood is about 30 days. This does apply to the BLL figure.
-A human is about 9 percent blood, assume a child weighs 20 kg.
-The Blood Lead Level considered to be “lead poisoning” is 30 micrograms per deciliter (1/10 liter) of blood. There are various measures like serum binding etc. but after factoring those in it is really the BLL that matters. However, the 30 mcg limit is arbitrary. The detrimental effect of lead is serious even down to very low exposure levels, too low to detect (and detection equipment is extremely sensitive, parts per trillion of lead have significant neurotoxic effects in vitro). Likewise just because some people are exposed to large amounts of lead and “live” doesn’t mean that major harm is not done. Such is the nature of brain damage.
-Adults men are less sensitive of course for a variety of reasons, but the effects are still very bad, including cognitive loss. For women who are pregnant at the time or planning to be in the future, lead is stored in the bones and elsewhere and can be released in large quantities all at once during pregnancy, producing a BLL that is very high, which is very bad news for both mom and especially the child as it does cross the placenta easily.
– Half of all metallic lead ingested gets absorbed into the bloodstream, therefore increasing BLL as you’d expect. 100% of inhaled does. It’s about the same for alloys like solder, and also oxides like lead oxide. It’s about the same for paint btw.
-Treatments to counteract lead ingestion don’t really exist. Chelation is a very paltry treatment only useful in acute cases of poisoning and has major problems, like removes beneficial metal elements from the body along with the lead, which greatly limits it’s usefulness.
So 30 mcg/dL is the poisoning threshold where we are already talking learning disabilities, reduced intelligence, behavioural problems etc., that is obviously way too much, so suppose 1/4 of that as an acceptable value. So if the half life is 30 days then the thirtieth root of 2 is the division each day, or about 1.023, and if there is 18 deciliters by 7.5 mcg/dL that’s 3.125 mcg per day eliminated from the blood (it is not eliminated from the *body*, most of it gets stored in body tissues and can be released in a spike again later, especially during pregnancy) which if half is absorbed, is 6.25 mcg ingestion per day at equilibrium. A cube of metal 66 microns on a side (density is 11 g/cc). It doesn’t take any stretch of the imagination to see that much getting into food through any of various routes, hands to mouth, cooking etc. Now for an adult multiply by 4 for body size and 2 for effect/kg for men, maybe less for women, and it’s more manageable but still very very small.
Experts on lead paint will readily point out that it takes only than a spec of paint dust (per day presumably) to cause lead poisoning. The above figures jive with that perfectly.
California determined several years back that no level of lead in drinking water is safe, decreasing the acceptable limit from 15 ppb to 1 ppb (note that it was very rare to actually reach the limit, in most cities it is very low, average for the US is something like 2 ppb). Others have followed suit. You can look up all these numbers in the scientific literature fairly easily as they are very well established, lead is actually one of the most studied substances in toxicology.
Most people just don’t get the connection between the different sources and “forms” of lead. The bioavailability is pretty much the same for the various common “forms”. They’ll agree that lead paint highly nasty and toxic but then refuse to acknowledge this implies they should be careful with lead solder or batteries, basically denying everything. Such is the success of the industry propaganda. Don’t be that person.
Youre mind might be boggling a bit at how this substance could be so common and yet awareness could be so low, the warning labels are so lacking etc. Well, yes it’s backwards but that’s politics for you. The solder flux has a big warning with an explanatory paragraph because it contains *ammonium chloride* -gasp!-. Aslo known as a known-safe additive to black licorice candies in the several percent by weight range. That the roll of solder contains enough lead to sustain “lead poisoning” in literally 200 thousand children for a month is just a side note I guess. I forget the acute toxicity, but I bet it is a lot higher too.
There is also the missing link here which is how much of what is in the environment actually gets into the body. However it is clear that prudence is called for here as the amount of the substance present are very large compared with it’s toxicity. Same as for any seriously toxic substance like mercury, you don’t need to spend forever futzing or arguing about trying to decide how much to clean up, there should really not be very much of it permitted to be present if it is this toxic. Prudence.
So having previously dealt with this problem, my recommendations for a basic prudent cleanup is:
Grab a notebook and survey the farm, including areas, garmets, objects and tools and equipment and estimate the relative contamination level in micrograms of everything. Jot down the worst offenders and anticipated cleanup procedure.
Make a rough cleanup plan, starting with the most contaminated stuff. Cleanup will cost some money. Such is but a small piece of the cost of the industry’s sociopathy, but it is a lot lower than the toxic effects so you’re getting a bargain. In some cases like a wire brush for battery terminals or a cloth that is badly contaminated, just throw it out. You won’t be able to clean it, trying to will only contaminate the buckets, etc used to clean. And what would you do with the wastewater? In some cases it may not be as cheap as you’d like, bu this is not the place to skimp.
Get rid of the lead solder and use lead free. I know some people think it is not as good or blah blah, but actually I have used it plenty and it’s fine. It is a bit different, and there is a short learning curve, but it met all my need without a hitch, including surface mount components etc. Also the vast majority of electronics products are in fact lead free these days due to RoHS and they work plenty well enough although some people will gripe and moan about potential problems like whiskers, it is clear that these are just people who have a knee jerk reaction to being told they must phase out lead when they are ignorant or in denial of the high toxicity (probably due to industry propaganda). In fact most RoHS components are *not* backwards compatible with lead solder, various bizarre metallurgical things happen at the interface between the lead free tinning on the part and the solder which will cause failure of the joint. There is nothing magic about lead.
You can use various optimizations to reduce the size of the problem and give better results, for example multi stage cleaning. I had a wire battery terminal brush for instance. To clean the tools that had been stored with it, probably all my tools over the years, I used 3 buckets and 2 cloths and dishwashing gloves, 2 with dish detergent and hot water, and a third with hot water for rinsing. Wash tool inthe first bucket, move to the second, wash again, then rinse and put on a clean surface, then when doen spray everything with wd-40 to displace any water and prevent any corrosion. I personally opted to throw out one of my toolboxes because it was quite rusty on the inside and would have been hard to clean and a new one isn’t that expensive, but I respect this may be fairly considered overkill or poor bang for your buck for some people.
I never got any testing done, but I have since found out about a handy product that might be useful called Lead Check test swabs. They have pretty good documentation. Also you can get a blood test for $100 or so, forget the hair or fingernail stuff as it is innaccurate.
If you’re in this for the long haul I think you should not skimp on things like toxic material handling (Also caught you using a grinder without safety glasses(!) on one of those videos). Also, I think there is some obligation if there are other people coming to the farm who may be more sensitive and/or frankly don’t deserve to have the decision made for them without their knowledge about what their exposure to a toxic substance is to be. Just being prudent about it is enough I think – clean up the really nasty stuff at least.
I created a category in the wiki for “Safety” since it seemed to be missing. Materials safety is a part, and Cory’s concerns about lead in particular should go under that, but it’s worth considering the whole issue of how to incorporate safety issues into OSE work.
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