Global Village Construction Set - open source machines!

[gnome]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD1EWGQDUTQ&feature=player_embedded

http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/

[gnome]

The podcast gives a good idea of the big picture of where they are headed with this:
http://agroinnovations.com/index.php/en_us/multimedia/blogs/podcast/2008/05/open-farm-tech-with-marcin-jakubowski/

This challenges the entire centralized industrial production model and the debt slavery financial model that goes with it.

[KGMe]

That's pretty cool, thanks.

[newmisty]

I think it's a bit more than pretty cool myself. Very cool is more like it.

Too bad it won't hit mainstream though.

[gnome]

Too bad it won't hit mainstream though.

Reprap is still rough around the edges, but it is going viral. I can see one of these in every home, or at least one in every neighborhood.


http://vimeo.com/5202148

[Fiat Metaler]

not sure I get this. division of labor was and interconnectedness was the key to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

There are M.D.'s in cuba who plant vegetable gardens and drive cabs to feed their families, but only a hippie would think that that is progress.

[KGMe]

not sure I get this. division of labor was and interconnectedness was the key to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

There are M.D.'s in cuba who plant vegetable gardens and drive cabs to feed their families, but only a hippie would think that that is progress.

This isn't about using humans as modular operators, but being able to substitute parts in modular tools. This would be great for poor farming communities, being able to achieve improved farming processes using tools they can build/maintain themselves.

[gnome]

Division of labor and economies of scale are extremely useful concepts that have gone horribly wrong on a global scale.

Here are the top 10 economies of scale... are these companies making our nation wealthier or poorer?

1 Wal-Mart Stores
2 Exxon Mobil
3 Chevron
4 General Electric
5 Bank of America Corp.
6 ConocoPhillips
7 AT&T
8 Ford Motor
9 J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.
10 Hewlett-Packard

Calling people hippies is irrelevant.

Division of labor has its pros and cons as well. It worked real well for the monarchy during the fuedal age: Serfs works for all, clergy prays for all, knights fight for all and the lords rule for all.

Open source tech is about individuals and communities sharing the knowledge to become self-reliant, rather than dependent drones in a neo-feudal society, which is where we are headed. It is also about getting beyond built-in-obsolescence (built to last forever, easily repaired if it doesn't last forever).

[gnome]

Some repeat here...now on TED indicates this is gaining some steam:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_9SlcnVKx4&feature=player_embedded

[newmisty]

That's awesome. What a self starter!

[Unclad Lad]

Fiat, think of Caterpillar and Komatsu and all the other industrial machine manufacturers as Microsoft and Apple. Their devices work quite well, but you have to buy their software, their parts, and their service to keep them running. GVCS is Linux. It might not be as elegant, and it might glitch more than the big boys, but you can build it out of easily available (ie: non-proprietary) parts. And when you don't need a digger anymore, but you need a combine, you can disassemble the one to make the other. And the cost of this knowledge is a computer and a data link!

This is monumental, Fiat.

[Unca Walt]

I think it is fargin BRILLIANT.

[gnome]

This is monumental, Fiat.

The more I think about it, the more it becomes apparent that this changes everything. Not just the globo-centralization of industry, but also the centralized banking model that finances the capital necessary to run global corps.

[Unclad Lad]

Not just the globo-centralization of industry, but also the centralized banking model that finances the capital necessary to run global corps.

It's a start. It's also why genetically-engineered seeds are so big now--it allows the ADMs of the world to control another point of production.

[Goldhedge]

This concept isn't new. You can join http://www.cnczone.com/
and make your own Computer Numerically Controlled mill. Same
idea here, except you make it out of wood, or metal, or plastic,
depending on the material and what bit you choose.

The difference is RepRap is additive - add plastic and build it.

A CNC mill is subtractive. You start with the raw material and
cut away. You design it in an AutoCad type program and there
are several Open Source cad programs available.

[HoldingAg]

Wow, this is absolutely groundbreaking stuff. Imagine buying a couple acres with some like minded friends, and having these two inventions the GVCS and the RepRap. Amazing.

HoldingAg

[gnome]

Here is an open-sourced multi-purpose solar-thermal device...solarflower...made from recycled stuff.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrMltEp-dcw&feature=player_embedded

[gnome]

Good talk on the bigger picture of where this is going:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIIzogiUHFY

[gnome]

.............


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMhG4fWQnlE

[gnome]

...........
http://blog.opensourceecology.org/2012/10/prototypes-built-to-date/


Global Village Construction Set – 62 Prototypes Built to Date (http://blog.opensourceecology.org/2012/10/prototypes-built-to-date/)Posted by Marcin


Factor e Farm has been building Global Village Construction Set (http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs.php) (GVCS) machines since 2008. That year, I announced the Global Village Construction Set concept for the first time in apresentation at the U. Missouri, Columbia (http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/UM_Presentation).
As of today, at least 62 protototypes have been built in 4 countries:
https://docs.google.com/drawings/pub?id=1H5vbC1FF7Q1tiQkeD5cPxNld9v1fw722NOpQ_7jHfs w&w=510&h=310
All entries in the icons in the graphic are hyperlinked to pictures and documentation. You need to click here to access the above document directly (https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1H5vbC1FF7Q1tiQkeD5cPxNld9v1fw722NOpQ_7jHfsw/edit) and double click on the icon to go to the link.
Let us know if you know of any more replications – we don’t know if the above list is comprehensive. See more information on the wiki (http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Prototypes_Built_and_Cost).

The graph above indicates project scaling towards the open source economy - paper on this forthcoming in the next issue of the MIT Innovations Journal. We are currently recruiting 4 machine designers (http://blog.opensourceecology.org/2012/08/recruiting-master-prototyper-machine-designers/), and we aim to get our prototyping rate to 4 prototypes per month at Factor e Farm by March of 2013. Since the success of the CEB Press Collaborative Production Run (http://blog.opensourceecology.org/2012/10/collaborative-production-run-video-compressed-eerth-brick-press/), we are shifting our recruiting to a focus on machine designers instead of fabricators. We found that production runs with 6-8 people using the Fabrication Diagram swarming method (http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Fabrication_Diagram) allow us to build a machine rapidly – within 1-4 days – provided that complete fabrication instructions are prepared carefully ahead of time.

[gnome]

...........


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAmwaNwu5XM&feature=player_embedded

[gnome]

NPR piece on 3-D printing. Not brilliant journalism(surprise), and doesn't really get into the open-source hardware discussion, but nevertheless growing evidence that 3D printing is gaining traction in the mainstream.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/01/04/168627298/3-d-printing-is-kind-of-a-big-deal/

[gnome]

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/509286/what-yoda-taught-me-about-3-d-printing/



Fueling such thinking is a rapid increase in the number of affordable 3-D printers. The winter 2013 issue of Make magazine, a publication for hobbyists, lists 15 different models, with prices starting around $500. The head of MakerBot, a company that recently opened a fancy retail store in Manhattan to sell $2,199 3-D printers, has called the technology the start of “the next industrial revolution.”Many do-it-yourself types believe the technology will become mainstream, despite what they agree are the significant limitations of today’s models. “Did anybody look at the computer mainframe or the Apple I and say, Oh look, there’s going to be one of these in every home? No,” says Andrew Rutter, a former lighting engineer who’s founded a startup, Type A Machines (http://www.typeamachines.com/), to start making and selling a personal 3-D printer. But he and others expect them to take off as personal computers did.
The term “3-D printing,” coined at MIT in the mid-1990s, describes a set of methods that vary widely in price, complexity, and capability. High-end industrial 3-D printers cost $75,000 and more, and some can build from materials as diverse as steel and ceramics.
Most consumer models use a relatively simple process called fused deposition modeling, invented and patented in the late 1980s by S. Scott Crump, cofounder of the industrial 3-D printing company Stratasys. As in a hot-glue gun, a length of special plastic is melted and fed through a nozzle. As gears guide the nozzle up, down, and around over a platform, the plastic is deposited in layers that harden, and a three-dimensional object takes shape.
http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/3d.printers.tablex519_0.png

The big drawback for consumers is that 3-D printers are still tricky to use and very limited in what they can make. The objects they produce are not just fairly crude but quite small, since the thermoplastic will warp at larger sizes. What’s more, thermoplastics are just the kind of cheap, brittle material many people hate. The hardware requires precise calibrations that will be beyond the patience of many users and operating the software is significantly more complicated than clicking “Print” from a Word document.
Another problem: once you’ve made yourself an iPhone case and a Yoda bust, what else is worth making? The answer is not entirely obvious, says Eric Wilhelm (http://www.instructables.com/member/ewilhelm/), founder of Instructables, an online catalogue of how-to tutorials. Wilhelm, who has been tracking the 3-D designs being created, says the bulk of them are models of people’s heads, often their own.
The constraints of the at-home technology explain why the latest shift in consumer 3-D printing is toward centralized facilities not unlike photocopy shops. Last year, the office store Staples said it would test a service called “Staples Easy 3-D”: customers could send in a design and then pick up the finished product. Another company, Shapeways, has opened the largest such facility yet, in New York City. It aims to print three to five million objects a year on higher-end printers, using materials that include ceramics, stainless steel, and silver.

[wiper]

that's pretty damn cool, thanks for sharing.

[hoarder]

One-eighth the cost of buying commercial machinery from Caterpillar of Komatsu.......?........ if you don't include the value of your labor.

How much is your labor worth, assuming you have the skills to do this? The most overlooked thing here is that you can't compete with mass production. This has always been the mechanics dillemma. You can easily burn a couple thousand hours of your own labor building a machine. Add at least 50K to the price tag to cover that.

I would much rather buy equipment at an auction for 1/8 the cost of new. Usually equipment in this price range has a few thousand hours left.
http://www.rbauction.com/heavy-equipment-auctions/

[gnome]

One-eighth the cost of buying commercial machinery from Caterpillar of Komatsu.......?........ if you don't include the value of your labor.

How much is your labor worth, assuming you have the skills to do this? The most overlooked thing here is that you can't compete with mass production. This has always been the mechanics dillemma. You can easily burn a couple thousand hours of your own labor building a machine. Add at least 50K to the price tag to cover that.

I would much rather buy equipment at an auction for 1/8 the cost of new. Usually equipment in this price range has a few thousand hours left.
http://www.rbauction.com/heavy-equipment-auctions/

Undoubtedly buying used makes sense in so many ways.

Sure, you cannot compete with mass production in terms of efficiency for a production run.

The cost of production is a fraction of what you pay for most products. Most of the costs have nothing to do with the product and everything to do with a corporation trying to suck as much cash as possible out of you.

Take out the billions spent on designing new products, advertising, packaging, buildings full of pencil pushers drinking coffee, patent lawyers, lawyers, lawyers and more lawyers, CEO salaries, union fees, bloated pensions, taxes, lobbying, shipping stuff around the globe...and of course the bloodsuckers on Wall St. take their cut. You don't just pay for a tractor, you are paying to support the entire global ponzi scheme economy.

And then, as a consumer, you keep on paying with overpriced parts, service and built-in-obsolescence.

We are talking about machines that might last for 100 years, that are fully and easily repairable, upgradeable and are constantly being improved by a global community of people who actually use whatever it is.

All of a sudden the economics of community-scale, open-sourced production starts to make a lot of sense.

Obviously, there are tradeoffs with economy of scale and opportunity cost in working on such a project. Same as any DIY project. But it still often makes economic sense to DIY. Folks at Open Source Ecology are getting pretty efficient with their production runs...machines can be made by a team of 5 guys in a day that will last a lifetime. Sounds efficient to me.

[gnome]

here is a screenshot of the cost comparison

full list at the link:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aj7WbjRT9mlmdE12c0o1T2FjeFhzYmRKLUthaVVUb EE&hl=en_US#gid=1

30058

[Unclad Lad]

Thank you. Gnome!!