The 50 Technologies

Walking through the 50 Technologies and Their Economic Impact

Disclaimer - Graph of completion Here we discuss all the tools, but please remember that in Part 1 of the 4 Part Series, many of the machines are still on the drawing board.

Agriculture

If you eat, you use a Tractor. Maybe not you directly, but the farmer that grew your food. And food is a $8T industry. The GVCS field agriculture machinery that support this $8T industry are:

Fig 1. The Tractor, Microtractor, Microcombine, Universal Seeder, Spader, Hay Cutter, Hay Rake, Baler, and Dairy Milker, and a Bakery Oven are critical tools of the $8T food industry.

Tractor, MicroTractor, Bulldozer and Power Cubes

The tractor is a cornerstone of a farm, construction, or other materials production industries. A tractor has the traction to pull things, and to do utility work with variou implements that can be added to a tractor and use the tractor’s mechanical power through a Power Take-off (PTO). As such, the tractor can be a swiss army knife of heavy duty work. For the smaller individual or home scale, we have the MicroTractor in the set, which is a small, walk-behind or ride-on tractor at the 16-32 hp size that can perform many gardening and utility functions and can fit in a smaller areas where a large tractor would be impractical. If we go up in scale - use a stronger frame and at least 64 hp, and add a bulldozer blade to the tractor - then we have a bulldozer.

The tractor is a machine on the scale of 50-320 hp in the GVCS ecosystem, and unlike traditional tractors, we focus on modular power. We currently use small 16 hp engine units at $17/hp (ref), which is the lowest cost way to obtain engine power, while making maintenance very easy. Like in nature where a tree is made of many branches, our tractor is made of many small engine units. This way, the same design pattern can be used in the 16 hp tractor as in the 320 hp tractor. The price for using larger diesel engines is 2-4 times larger.

By using the modularity concept, we create our typical construction set approach for heavy machines. For example, if a large tractor frame is fitted with a bulldozer blade - then we don’t require a separate bulldozer in addition to a tractor. This saves a lot of resources - making technology significantly lower cost to maintain. Exploring the limits of modularity, we found that it is much less expensive to scale our machines usig modular and overbuilt parts that make sense both for small and large machines. For example, we can use 4 of our identical track units, each rated for up to 80 hp - Our track unit, for example, allows for a $30k version that matches the traction of a Cat D7 - a sizeable cost savings comprd to a base price of ½ a million. .

Fig. Pattern Language for a Tractor - up to automated control.

The key is making it easy and quick to interchange parts - from small parts to large implements. This is a great challenge for advanced industrial design.

Fig. Industrial smaller parallel and trained configuration. OSE machines can be designed like this, but higher flexibility of the OSE platform can allow for an improved configuration.

Fig. The flexibility of a modular OSE tractor. The modular OSE tractor can be built from the same components, but apply to 16 hp or 320 hp machines while using the same over-engineered components such as the ½” thick steel tracks

Spader, Seeder, Bulldozer

Your food today is grown largely by tractor-driven tilling and seeding, unless you’re a breatharian. Tillage in the OSE system chooses the spader as a more progressive technology compared to the age-old plow.

Fig. (Image of 1800 steam tractor with 50 bottom plow)

The spader works essentially like a bunch of shovels moving rapidly - which till soil without crating a hardpan typical of the more common plow. Manufacturers claim that spading uses 40% less fuel than plowing - because a spader can combine tilling, harrowing, and planting in one operation. A plow, which drags through the soil, requires a lot of wheel-to-ground traction, whereas a spader requires very little - thus avoiding soil compaction. It takes a spader under 9 minutes and 2 gallons of fuel per acre of field - such that feeding Dunbar Village would take 6 hours to plant for a whole year of crop Thus, one day to plant, two days to harvest - and the village has food for the year.

The tractor and universal seeder is an example of how we approach multiple purpose machines. The tractor is a large-size swiss army knife for doing many different tasks. The Universal seeder is designed to plant all types of seed, from alfalfa to wheat, to tubers, and to live plants like sweet potato slips. Modifying the device rapidly is key to this flexibility.

Fig. Swiss army knife tractor concept

The point of using powerful machines wisely is that in the OSE perspective of lifetime growth - life could become easy so we can focus on evolving as humans. Our experiment involves building a college campus where peole live this. When they graduate, they know how to organize a village to spend 2 hours per day working on survival, and then the rest of their life they pursue their highest ideals.

The experimental village thus requires one farmer who is employed 3 days of the year, assuming the equipment does not break down, and generates 30 acres * $20k/acre of sweet potato, and $5k/acre for 10 acres of wheat if that is turned into bread - or $650k worth of food for the community with direct marketing. That is $27k/hour if baking is automated - a decent pay, but not like the $25k/minute rate of Warren Buffett

Of course these are unreasonable figures, but they do represent the idea. The only way that customer acquisition and marketing costs do not ruin such ideals is in the case of direct marketing - where the on-site farmer-scientist provides for a captive audience of the Dunbar village. If each person eats about $2600 per year , feeding 150 people would involve revenues of $390k - but that would be a full time job. We will look more carefully at the business model for resident farmer agriculture in the Enterprise chapter.

Now it would take more time to do a diversified operation, but this is shown just as a baseline to see what’s possible in terms of the effort. Several Ph.D.’s can be granted to develop a diversified, 40 acre subscription farm, using open source equipment and a captive market, or Local Food Nodes as part of a distribution platform.

The OSE project will develop such a food enterprise both for its campuses and for the outside community - once all the farming machines are done, the aquaponic greenhouse production is optimized, and derivative food processing tools are developed.

The open source tractor can be built at a cost of $125/hp at a scale of 80 hp, compared to $370-$1000 for other brands. It is useful to understand the basic cost breakdown based on off-the shelf parts:

Fig. Cost breakdown of a tractor by Frame, engine, hydraulics, control, automation, and balance of system - $125/hp. (p590MJ)

The cost advantage is less visible at the 32 hp MicroTrac, at $160 per hp - though but a comparable mahine like the tracked Toro Ding costs around $1000/hp (ref).

Fig. Microtrac with tooth bar bucket can till your garden, and provide valuable utility work. It is an indidspensible utility machine for any prosumer.

Hay Cutter, Rake, Baler

If farm animals are involved, then you need these. Or if you want to move large quantities of materials, then a bale is a useful form: from a bale of hay, brush, cotton, cardboard, or plastic - bales allow large scale moving of materials. Bales of aluminum cans are likewise useful for melting down in your induction furnace. If you are making fuel pellets from biomass, plastic pellets for making 3D printer filament - you will need a baler to make 1 ton bales.

Dairy Milker

For animal husbandry, hay baling stores hay for the winter. Unless you are talking about the fish in your home aquaponic system. Dairy products themselves are $116B

of the global economy - hence the relevance of the dairy milker.

Table: values of the overall food, dairy, cattle, vegetable markets worldwide. Combining the dairy milker with computer vision and automation, we envision a solar robotic milker - our MicroTrac with a milking stall - that drives up to a cow to milk her, and then brings the milk back for storage and processing. This allows field milking without human labor for small diversified robofarms that combine the best of regenerative agriculture with modern tehnology to relocalize farming.

Fig. Robotic milker

MicroTrac

A very interesting use arises with a small, solar, robot tractor - the MicroTrac driven by a solar panel. By adding a $10 Raspberry Pi Zero Controller and a $100 solar panel you can be your robotic tractor - for agriculture and other. You can now mow your lawn automatically, and even pelletize it for fuel for a pellet stove. This is possible because today - advanced microelectronics such as the Raspberry Pi is 100 times faster that the first supercomputer, which cost $9M in 1975.

Fig. A solar-driven MicroTrac concept with solar panel and $50 arduino controller can provide autonomous agriculture

Bulldozer

Now add a bulldozer blade to a beefed up, tracked tractor - and you have one of the most powerful devices for regeneration - or destruction - depending on how you use the machine. Bulldozers are powerful earth moving machines - to build roads, grade house foundations, and in agriculture - to build regenerative earthworks for water and erosion. The biggest example is the 12,000 square miles that have been regreened in China - the Loess Plateau. .

Fig. Loess Plateau reforestation

So, if you ever drove on a road - you used a bulldozer. Maybe not you, but whoever graded the road base.

Microcombine

The Microombine is used to harvest grains and seeds of any type. This is the core of human harvests world wide. For the OSE case, we have a much more flexible and modular machine in mind. Based on our module-based aproach, we can use the same drive platform as the tractor

Fig. Showing the base drive platform that can be used

Bakery Oven

Humble bread is a $419B global market https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-trends/global-industry-reports/manufacturing/bakery-goods-manufacturing.html . It is the 12th most popular food in the world. https://www.farmflavor.com/at-home/what-is-the-most-popular-food-in-the-world/ And 49% of Americans eat bread https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/each-day-50-percent-america-eats-sandwich-180952972/ .

Now bulldozers, tractors, and combines are all good - but the next step for gobal agriculture is the transition to perennial polyculture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpJR2yfLUU0 , with only a small fraction of tillage ramaining.

Construction - 13 Tools

If you want to build a charter city or a smaller campus, you will need construction equipment - and a trencher to put in gigabit internet fiber between the locations.

The tools in the construction part outside of the tractors include the backhoe, trencher, cement mixer, sawmill, CEB press, well-drilling rig, soil pulverizer, hammermill. The universal rotor is a tool used in other sectors of the GVCS - and the SeedHouse is a living machine.

Fig. 13 tools of the construction part of the Global Village Construction Set.

Backhoe, Trencher, Cement Mixer

The backhoe or excavator can be used to dig aquaponic ponds, foundation trenches. It can be used to remove stumps, do trenching, and with a grapple it can be used to lift logs or to hoist heavy objects. Backhoes are relatively simple devices - a set of pivot joints that use hydraulic cylinders for their motion - producing thousands of pounds of digging force at the touch of control levers. There are both side-to-side moving backhoes, but a 360 degree rotating backhoe is much more flexible. The small side to side version can be used on a front quick attach of a tractor.

Fig. OSE backhoe from 2010 https://www.google.com/search?q=ose+backhoe&client=ubuntu&hs=ToH&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjLzZKelOLYAhULbawKHQo-DVwQ_AUICigB&biw=1351&bih=731#imgrc=t8j52U9--mn6BM: mounted on he original lifetrac, a small one used for water line trenching in 2012 http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/File:Bhp1.jpg , and a larger one from 2013 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6Jpysxw3Ty-oH4bggp32PR_rPWr8bKC1 . Next iteration is the 360 degree backhoe with remote control drive to facilitate hydraulic line routing.

The trencher in the original GVCS icon is a wheel trencher. We built 2 prototypes, and the next iteration will be a chain-based trencher based on our favorable experience with oversized chain drive on the bulldozer tracks.

Fig. OSE Trencher http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Trencher - 2011 and 2013 builds. The cement mixer is indispensable. Cement has been used in ancient Rome and in mesoamerican temples. Scotland's County Cork had 23,000 lime kilns at one time - had one kiln per 80 acres. Wood or coal was used as fuel. http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/09/lime-kilns.html http://www.chapelgatehome.uk/our-blog Portland cement tool over lime cement in the last 100 years, but lime concrete is favorable in foundations becaue it doesn’t crack as easily as Portland. Using modern appropriate technology, lime cement production in solar microfactories is a viable enterprise at the 1 ton per day scale using an open source microkiln the size of a refrigerator. Limestone goes in one end, and lime comes out the other. With such small appliances costing around $1k, cement production can be distributed - while making cement production carbon neutral, annihilating the current 5% CO2 emission share of the the concrete industry.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concrete This is possible in about 50% of America, where the bedrock is made of limestone. That’s a $10B industry in the USA alone.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement_industry_in_the_United_States

The cement fryer - a rotary lime kiln - is much like the cement mixer: a Universal Rotor with a heating element. A rotating pipe heated by PV, and an Arduino microcontroller to measure temperatures and guide the process to efficient completion. While not part of the 50 GVCS technologies, it’s a ready derivative:

Fig. PV of the Open Source Materials Production Facility, a solar Power Cube, a Universal Rotor, metal pipe and an Arduino microcontroller constitute the lime cement maker.

If we want to go to the essence of construction, take the backhoe excavator, chase it with a bulldozer with ripper shanks, and then rock under a site could be extracted to build a pond. This rock, if limestone, is feedstock for your lime kiln. In some places, rock outcroppings make access to limestone easy.

CEB Press , Soil Pulverizer, and Sawmill

The Compressed Earth Brick press and sawmill are critical tools for construction in that they produce materials. The CEB Press allows one operator to load raw dirt right from the building site to produce about 5000 bricks in a day - enough for a small house.

Fig. The CEB Press is the first machine that we have prototyped, and it is ready for widespread replication around the world.

We have used the soil pulverizer to prepare soil for pressing CEB blocks. The soil pulverizer was used to both pulverize the soil, and its bucket was used to press bricks for CEB construction.

Fig. Soil pulverizer - Aidan on the tractor + loading the brick press by Yoonseo

Our next step on the CEB press is a full soil conditioner which pulverizes soi, adds cement at a measured quantity of 5%, and then loads the mixture into the CEB press - to allow for production of high quality, stabilized block.

Fig. The soil conditioner accepts raw soil from a tractor loader, mixes a measured amount of cement, and loads the prepared mixture into the CEB press for effective production of stabilized block at 12 cents ( 10 cent cement cost for a 20 lb block, and 2 cents gasoline cost). per block in materials. This means that we can build a 1’ thick CEB wall section for $50 in materials.

The sawmill is a machine that can produce dimensional lumber - a staple of construction. Our sawmill is a variety known as a swing-blade sawmill, which has a single blade that can rotate 90 degrees and make a dimensional piece of lumber by going forward and back on a piece of wood. We chose the dimensional sawmill for its simplicity over a bandsaw mill, as blade sharpening is much easier - and maintenance is the larger cost of any equipment if that equipment is designed for a lifetime.

The sawmill is a good example of how we can use GVCS product ecologies to reduce complexity and reduce the cost of equipment. We design not just individual machines, but