Anthony douglas log

May 5

Ok, so we made some progress on the torch table today. Tyler is drawing the existing table in Solidworks, Devin is up to some stuff, and I was assembling a list of parts, and things we need to do, with a focus on the things that we are most sure will need to be done sooner or later. Doing these things first helps to ensure that the time spent is not going to be thrown down the drain later; it provides a sort of known-good way of getting at least a bit of traction at the beginning of the project, which will be built upon.

Now I need to sort of save my work by doing something someone else can build upon, if I were to disappear tomorrow, for example, and also to communicate with the rest of the team what I have learned and whatever news I have.

Things to do: There is a document on the kitchen table we are using to add todo things and things to acquire as we think of them. It would be nice if we could have both a high level of accessibility of the kitchen table document, while also the benefits of a google doc, but ultimately if we have to pick one it seems like the paper is still the better choice. Google docs just are too slow and take too long to access. I noticed that they are usually forgotten and remain unused, with the result that we fail to keep track of things or use documentation altogether. Having a shopping list on paper that we actually use rather than one on google docs that is not accessible, forgotten about, or for whatever reason not actually used, is not as good, ultimately.

Ok, so after having a look at the lasersaur manual,

Very basic system diagram thus far, it is far from detiailed or complete. I don't know yet if we need a 24 v psu.. The stepper motors are actually 4.5 volts, 2.5 amps. It depends if anything on the driveboard or the motor controllers actually needs 24 v, or if it is only used for other things, i.e. switched by but not used by the drive board.

The current set resistors should be about 26.1 kohm, or something close to that, according to the equation in the lasersaur manual.

We may be able to use the same driver to drive both x axis motors. otherwise, it looks like just parallelizing 2 drivers should be fine.

I looked up the motors, and they are probably compatible with the lasersaur software. The steps per mm of travel will need to be adjusted, hopefully that won't be too hard.

a toolchain example is .svg file (vector graphic from e.g. inkscape) -> bbb, then streamed to the atmega on the driveboard, which does the gcode interpreting, and handling the state of the robot.

Looks like we can defeat all interlocks and the door switches easily enough. The main safety interlock can double as a master power switch, apparently.

There is a spare stepper motor in this box of electronics, here. We can probably use it fine, although it occurs to me generally that we have a problem at OSE with a poor stock of standard useful things, which really slows things down and holds things up, sometimes. The just in time thing doesn't work well here. It's another story, but it would probably not be a bad idea to have a couple extra arduino, stepper, screwdriver bits, 5/8 inch bolts etc. just handy as a matter of course.

For z height control ultrasonic looks promising still, but making our own ultrasonic sensor is a small project of it's own. An arduino avr or pic, stepper controller, we can use the power supply from the lasersaur (5v) and the same stepper and gecko drive looks like the most promising approach. We could use a different, smaller and cheaper stepper driver, but we have a spare or even two of the geckos, so I don't think it makes sense for now to try to use a different driver. My main standing concern is the beam path of the ultrasonic sensor, and the supposed 1mm resolution of the sensor. The positional envelope we want to stay in is +/-1/16', only 1.5 mm, so you want higher resolution than that, really. The commercial ultrasonic based controllers don't do anything about the beam, I noticed. They just measure slightly to the side of the torch head.

link to edit and view the document:t

Standing questions, which I hope to improve on, tomorrow, include: -brushes for the flats to keep out debris? This could end up being important to avoid jams, although easy to improvise it may need to be done wone way or another. -power supply situation? -how easy is it to set the steps per inch -use a compensation table with the lasaurapp? -we need to get on with ordering the stuff like limit switches etc. Assemble part numbers, consult the others and combine their lists, do some shopping and email MArcin a list of stuff, distinguish between what will be needed sooner or later for progress, and what is nice but optional, or based on the current proposed way forwards. -acceleration and deceleration rate of the steppers needs to be addressed to avoid missed steps -general mechanical fit of the system needs to be investigated, and what needs doing identified

I read a bit on existing models and projects, and found the Torchmate growth series table, which is a commercial version that is a lot like what we are trying to do here, apparently. It is a table with replaceable toolheads that can do milling and routing, too. Not accurate milling the way a bridgeport, for instance, can, but it could do the rough machining and bulk removal which would really help a ton.

April 30

The CEB press was completed in the nick of time, and Scott, the buyer, will test it further before leaving for far off places with it. Retail price is $9k, plus you need a power cube to run it, 2 for 12 bpm. The accuracy of the blocks coming from the machine is excellent, we got it to within 1/16 on all dimensions for a couple of test bricks.

Interestingly, the accuracy on the width-wise dimensions, which stems from the width of a plasma cut plate of steel, is within 1/64th, which comes from the accuracy that the plasma cutter has. So basically the accuracy of the cutter was successfully leveraged there. It seems clear to me that it can be elsewhere, too, and that this will cut the labor requirements of manufacture a great deal.

 The Microhouse structure and roof is also done, with only some more interior stuff like putting the the very last of the laminate flooring, ladder for the loft etc. in left.  Now the main focus is the torch table.

I haven't actually bought a ticket yet to anywhere, for better or for worse. The thing is that it changes so much here depending on who else is present, what the current focus is etc. that I might as well almost be in a different place. I had thought that I had really had my fill and it was time to go soon. But I want to see how things go in the next week, as I am tempted to stay further, maybe another month even, if I find I am contributing a good amount and also learning a lot.

But today I really, really need to get in to Cameron to do some personal things. One of the major problems I have had here is the accumulation of personal things that I cannot get done because of the lack of access to the things present in a city, and secondly because of the increased time it takes to do normal routine things like cooking and cleaning that inhabiting in a group environment of this nature (which is not like some other group environments) entails.

I hope to get together with the guys and get some performance based design criteria down for the torch table, and place some orders for parts we know we will need, etc. We also need to ask Marcin about the history of the table etc.

April 23

Today was the last day of the Microhouse (structure) build. Tyler, Kyle, Devin and myself went down to the workshop to have a look and start the torch table development. We started a folder system using bittorrent sync to share files, hoping it will be more reliable than dropbox. We are going about making the design requirements, but still need to bring Marcin on board so things are congruent with the larger scale plans. From the look of things like now from what we know of the large scale movement of the enterprise, it doesn't look like it makes any sense to use the oxy acetylene torch. Instead, we should skip straight to working on the plasma torch head approach. Also, it may make a lot more sense to get this existing table working first, before we try to reach out to the advantages that gridbeam might bring. More of a bird in the hand worth two in the bush sort of thing. Aligning this table looks a lot easier than building a new one.

April 20

We had a great day yesterday; the ceb press was breaking down in a variety of interesting ways, difficult enough to figure out to be interesting and educational, but not enough to stop us. We have 5 different types of easily spotted jams, plus some software bugs which are harder to see happening unless you already know the software. Also it is not clear what the origin of some of the jams is; it may be that they start as software bugs but then become something else, which we would see as mechanical clogging, for instance. They can all be smoothed out relatively easily when we build the next press, I think. We stayed up late, I stayed till about 10 pm, pressing bricks. We figure we need about 3000 to 4000 bricks in total.

The drawer cloggage, bridging, bashing and jamming against the drawer roller,

Other bugs we spotted include the misalignment of the rear piston and the whole structure back there, the design of the top of the hopper area, etc.

The importance of an actual pulverizer became clear; a substantial fraction of the soil dumped on the grate would normally not go through, and we would brush it off or manually pulverize it, joking about how you might someday build a machine to do this (and some people of course chiming in with the old "zat would never work!" refrain while unable or unwilling to say even vaguely why they thought as much. It's particularly funny when people say that about something that you already are confident works pretty well and is widely used).

April 18

Hm, I've been pretty bad about filling in my log recently. Largely because there wasn't much to tell. We've been getting the place, mostly the hab lab, ready for the influx of 24 people for the microhouse workshop that starts on Friday. Tonight will be the inaugural dinner.

We planned for and bought food, did some more trim and painting, assembled bunk beds and moved things around.

After the microhouse workshop there is another one, and then we are going to be advancing the torch table project until mid May.

April 15

We assembled bunk beds, put in carpet, moved things around, etc. Kyle and Chris have arrived, so with James Slate it is more exciting here. We still have to do something about the food for 20 people, and dinner for 22.

April 14

Pretty good day today. We got what we expected to get done re preparing the infrastructure for the upcoming workshop. I volunteered to use the paint sprayer, a dirty task, but I was happy to do it as I am a fan of the use of labor multiplying machines like this. I discovered the spray nozzle was very poor, though. It, I gather, is supposed to put paint in a line. But it applies a great excess to the end of the line. The spray nozzle thing is fixed and non-adjustable. I don't know how they managed to do things this way, as it leaves a line on the wall of extra paint. I tried to compensate by moving the nozzle around some extra.

I also ran in to the problem of the paint being too translucent to cover the wall beneath sufficiently in one coat. The main limiting factor in how much you can put on in one coat is the formation of drips of paint. Particularly a problem for a ceiling, of course, especially one with areas that encourage flow to a point, as this one does. I was conservative for room 1, but on the next room I did I, in trying to find the optimum, put too much on, and got dripping. Nasty state of affairs. I reduced thickness for the next room, but not quite enough, still it wasn't nearly as bad. But I knew a second coat was almost out of the question, certainly with the sprayer, as the stuff needs to be put back in the room. We could cover things with plastic, though. Multiple coats of paint has always struck me as an absolutely abominable divider of labor power, though. I mean it nearly doubles the amount of work to two coats, and sometimes 3 is needed. Can we seriously not just invent a paint that has a better opacity to viscosity to drying rate performance, here? What if we add a thixotropic agent to the paint - thixotropic substances are liquid when they are under relatively high shear forces, but become solids when they are left mostly alone. So the paint goes on as a liquid, but it becomes a weak solid - sort of a gel - after application. That would certainly allow an increase in layer thickness. Or we could load more pigment particulates per liter of paint to increase opacity. It needs to be nearly double, though. What if we use flakes instead of spherical particles? If they aligned in the right way maybe that would improve the pigment per unit volume to opacity ratio. Especially if we could get them to align after application to the surface somehow. Make them electrets, or embed magnetic particles within them in the right orientation... or there may be some approach using surface physics or something. A paint that saved you from needing a second coat would sell like hotcakes to painters the world over.

April 13

Hey, where did my entries until april 12 go?? Well I ain't re-writing them now. Basically what has happened since the ninth is that we poured the foundation for the microhouse, planned what we need to do to be ready for the April 18 workshop, and got on with some of the ordering, and shopping. Dorkmo arrived yesterday, so that is great to have another person here helping. James slade is supposed to come down some time soon, too. There is a lot of painting, cleaning, fixing up etc. to do to ensure we are ready to house and feed 20 workshop participants for 5 days, then about as many for 3 days more after, for the CEB workshop.

We encountered an interesting situation in which we designed a bunk bed to build, needing 4 in the near term and 6 for the longer term, but found that the BOM would cost $125 at Menards, and a bunk bed on amazon.com would be $150 after shipping. It uses a metal frame, instead of wood. I think we may have been able to slash the price of ours by using less wood, or maybe we would find that metal pipes ended up cheaper. I think it is an important case study that should not be forgotten. We had a similar situation with the paint sprayer. We should be able to make stuff like this by now. When we look at the things we want made, we are not able to make them. Also, the things we want done, our equipment cannot do. Why? And why should we focus on ourselves, though? Well, if we look at the example of FOSS, I have read that the main reason it came into existence and was built to it's current point is that software engineers like it better, it making their jobs and lives a lot better and easier. The benefits that accrue to non-software engineers are mainly a form of collateral benefit. But we should expect such benefit.

April 9

Hopefully today we will finish up and power up the mixer. I have collected a lot of notes that need to be input and acted on, for the documentation of the next version of the source of the mixer. Then we need to do some stuff on the CEB press.

If I could only say one more thing here, it would be that I think it is also very important that OSE specify a set of standard fabrication tools, input materials such as stock, welding wire, etc. and training states for the people in it. By tools I include the building, safety garmets, drill bits, everything. The tools can be used for the training, I am currently quite persuaded that as long as safety is paramount you can learn over time how to do things effectively, with access to the internet and, ideally, a teacher here and there.

Things are really picking up, the weather is more hospitable, I think the next month and a bit are going to be very, very interesting and productive :).

I have been trying for a long time to learn both python and Inventor, and keep wishing I had learned it already. It's the nature of capital, of course, much like how many people who rent homes take a very long time to make a down payment on a house; accumulating capital is often pushed out because of the everyday press of other things, preventing long term progress.

april 8

We are very much expecting to finish the pulverizer build tomorrow. There is some trouble with the shaft, and the tooth bars just need to be bolted on, and that's it. The bucket also serves as a front end loader. Then we need to integrate the output of the build process into the product development, as enabling others to efficiently produce another unit is central to the enterprise. We have the time lapse as a record of the process, and also the time logs we have been keeping. I really wish, and I said this at the beginning, that we had a camera or several, documenting the whole process. The camera misses a lot. Even just now, I went in and asked if there were any shots of the shaft, so I could look at it instead of taking it all off to look at it. No. The shaft has been kicking around for many days of build time, and there is still no clear picture of it anywhere?

The real test, IMO, will come some time after the build process, to see how well we integrate the experience from the completely untested alpha into the tested once then overhauled beta version of the source code for the mixer, as well, of course how well the mixer works, and compares with units you can obtain in other ways.

april 7

Pretty good build day. I replaced the propane tank regulator this day, I think. I have been forgetting about my log to some degree, and will try to fill it in at the end of each day. When we are not actually at our computers the value of filling it in during the day is really too low.

April 6

Hoping to do just a little more today on the build, but I have a backlog of domestic work too, cooking, laundry, all that sort of thing that really adds up.

BTW for anyone who is not already aware, my plan is to stay till mid may, from the beginning of May the plan is to work on the torch table. But the soil mixer must be done for the upcoming workshops. I still need to install ubuntu on this computer, too, and there are some other things.

The hose for the hot water heater leaks propane, so that is a problem that we need to try to fix real soon, as it must be 2 or more pounds a day lost. We can turn it off except for showers, that will slash it severely. The welder was taking up a lot of time by malfuctioning, a problem that seems almost trivial to design around. The wire feed was incapable of overcoming the resistance to the motion through the liner and tip, is all. The liner is a ferromagnetic steel, so it collects filings etc. I think this was an important factor, as I disassembled and checked the resistance to motion on a range of counts, and it was only the liner that was unusually high, although still not that bad, it is kind of hard to push a wire. Sheer variety of things that can go wrong yet could be easily designed away seems to highlight to me how the tools around us are designed with criteria very different than what the user's desires are, which the users often blame on incompetence of the manufacturers, or just assume that it's harder than it is to design things to meet our needs better, even in the more obvious ways. I think the truth is that this sort of thing is mainly caused by the design criteria being so different than what the role and manner in which we want to use the tool.

In a way this is really important, because although the equipment designed at FeF may not seem super sophisticated, merely the congruence of what we are designing for and what the tool will be used for can get us enormous gains in the cost to performance ratio of the tool. The question is often asked of open source projects: how do you possibly expect to improve on the cost to performance ratio of the stuff from closed source, conventional manufacturers, when they have so much capital and experience at their disposal? I think this aformentioned reality is part of the answer. Ultimately the best argument is the success of prior open source projects, though, at doing so.

update: Good day indeed, today. The freedom of working on the weekend was actually very helpful, just being more free to use my time as I found suitable. Although I started later and stopped for an hour or two there, I got about as much and maybe more done, I think, and also got some domestic stuff done, too. I put the holes in the tine modules, then marshalled the nuts and bolts and got some kinks worked out there, got the welder #4 mostly working again by replacing the torch liner, finished welding the tooth bars, ground them, ground the angle plate in the bucket, tacked it in place, got the bearings fitting on the shaft and in place ok, got some progress on the motor mount, fixed a missing hole problem, and investigated some potential build and development process improvements.

April 5

It's the weekend! Yay! I want to go back to the workshop and do some more stuff. We try to take the weekend off, which I think is a very good idea, and enlightened. Enthusiasm and the energy that a project team has is not in opposition to making good decisions regarding a division of one's time.

The thing is that this is the sort of thing that I would love to be able to do on the weekend at home.

April 4

The wiki just destroyed all my edits, and my retrospective edits for the past 2 days, which included the build process. The edit window indicated "view source", and had the entries in the window, indicating they were part of the source of the page. Still, I highlighted the area and pressed control+c for basic disaster mitigation, so I would have a copy on the clipboard in case. Then I pressed f5 to reload the page to get an actual edit window, and while it was loading, right clicked, to be extra sure it copied it by clicking on the right click context menu. The copy etc. options were greyed out. The page reloaded and everything is gone, including in the history. I don't have time to add it back now, as it is 10:30 and we need to proceed with the build process.

I input my time sheet and updated my log for the last 1.5 hours. Time to go! File:TIMESHEET INPUT.ods

march 31

We have finished the dozuki guide today, I just went over it to check for bugs etc. now.

In the afternoon I finished limewashing 2 more hotel rooms, we will see tomorrow if they need another coat.

march 28

We worked on the fabrication instructions today. There was some backtracking due to some co-ordination issues. The illustrations for the dozuki are also being made. My completed fab instructions need to be integrated with an older, incomplete version for which we have some illustrations, otherwise the illustrations would need to be re-done.

I did some limewashing got about half a room done, much faster than usual. The trick I developed was to splash limewash on, then spread it into an even layer with the paintbrush, because otherwise the rate of material transfer from bucket to wall is a major bottleneck. Not much limewash comes with the bucket. A super soaker type squirt gun would work very well here, greatly increasing the rate of limewashing, with the current mix. I doubt it would clog, and if it did you could unclog it periodically and still end up with a large improvement factor. Ultimately this shows the importance of actually going ahead and trying things out on the ground. There is a lot of gold to be found in both armchair thinking and research and discussion, but I think that what is often left off the table is the sort of exploration that just gave me a 3x speed improvement; it includes a certain skepticism regarding the essentiality of sticking with the usual approaches. Our situation is never exactly the same as what others face, and that opens up room for doing things differently. A sprayer may seem attractive, for instance, but it wouldn't help much at the perimeter of the walls anyway, because it would get a lot on the roof. Secondly, we only have a 1.5 rooms left for now, so investing the time and effort in inventing a sprayer makes little sense.

source note: to reduce cracking, spraying the wall enough that it darkens, then allowing it to sit for about 5 minutes helps a bit, to reduce cracks by maybe 35%. It is important with this method to start at the top and work down, or you get splashes and drip marks. Set up the ladder, fill the bucket only a bit full so it is comfortable to hold, paint near the ceiling carefully. Then you can start splashing. Holding the rim of the bucket close to the wall, use the brush to sort of paddle out limewash, to get it on the wall. Proceed in a line, and stack the lines as far as you can reach. Get an idea of how much a splash covers after spreading after a few full repetitions of the splash and spread, and spread your splashes accordingly. Then spread with horizontal brush strokes, followed by long vertical stokes for the desired texture. Any drips or splash marks should be gone over with the brush within less than a minute or two, or they may partially dry and leave an undesireable mark, although going over repeatedly with the brush can help reduce these. The brush abrades the wall and gets mud in the limewash if you scrub hard, so try to press lightly. We want a layer as thick as we can get without dripping (which with this mix, 1:1:0.2 by volume of lime, water and salt, does not appear to increase cracking over a thin layer), and to reduce the mud contamination in hopes on not needing to do a second coat, which would greatly increase workload. If you do need a second coat, try to use uncontaminated limewash.

March 27

disassembled tine module, for production of a 3d exploded view of the tine module SoilPulverizertines_disassembled.skp

March 26

A load of gravel came first thing today, I took a humble video and put it on youtube. (currently sideways, I'm hoping youtube will have the capacity to rotate it after upload, http://youtu.be/0BfR3y66ATk) Order from Sweiger shop for the steel placed ( based on what the BOM, accessible through the dev board through dozuki, specifies, minus what we had in stock, plus some extra while an order is being placed) . Got the hydraulic diagram up, too Soil_Mixer_-_Overall_Machine_-_Hydraulic_Diagrams. The only thing there really is the cushion valves, and it would be nice to know more about what lies within the lifetrac cabin, but this sort of system diagram, which specifies inputs and outputs, without bothering with the actual details of what is in the box, has many advantages, too.

In the afternoon we spread some gravel, I finished the interior painting and put the carpet and beds back, and put some carpet from the silo to put in the hab lab while the original tiles are awaiting washing. Whoever's idea it was to use carpet tiles deserves a thank you, as they have proven more suited to the hab lab than normal carpet many times. Some weak adhesive on the back of them would be good, though, as they stick up sometimes and you can trip on them.

March 25

Starting today at 9. The main thing is the bom and then the order from swieger (Sweiger?) shop, then the hydraulics diagram with google Draw. Andrew is doing the fabrication procedure.

google docs has a bit of a problem: when I go to the workshop, I can't edit the spreadsheet anymore, because google docs can't handle not having an internet connection. I cut and pasted the BOM into Calc for now, then will paste it back into the bom.

got he hydraulics diagram done, will put them up tomorrow

March 24

I worked on the bill of materials, then went and searched the workshop to determine what we did and did not have in stock here, and so what we need to order. I'm getting a bit more familiar with the shop, but I still missed some stuff that we had in stock, thinking we did not.... anyway, it was good news in the end, we have all the hydraulic parts, and many of the others, too.

Then we did some painting in the rooms, including our bedrooms, so we slept outside them tonight, because of the fumes. There is still more painting tomorrow, so it will be the same tonight. In the evening Marcin stopped by, and we did some review of the bom and what we had in stock, and what parts/materials need to be ordered for the mixer build. I'll review the bom again, knowing where the stock is kept this time, produce a derivative file that is less verbose as a list of stuff to submit as an order from swieger shop, then email Marcin the list, make any changes needed, and fax it to swieger shop using the faxzero.com service (why swieger doesn't accept orders by email I don't know).

March 21

Friday, we spent today on the mixer changing the DXF files in an attempt to greatly reduce the amount we'd have to pay the fab shop to cut the steel for us. By keeping the big plates and many of the strip pieces aside to cut ourselves from plate with a torch by hand or stock strops with the ironworker, we slashed the bill from $2000 to $750 or so. I made some progress on installing Ubuntu, too, and installing, freecad, openscad and librecad, mainly a matter of overcoming error after error.

We spent the afternoon limewashing and preparing a room for limewashing, then we started a narrated historical tour of FeF, which I'm hoping we can do more of on Monday.

March 20

We spent this morning, mostly, fixing a couple holes and propagating the changes through the dependent files for the mixer. We got 1.5 rooms of limewashing done, in the afternoon. I got eh ubuntu live usb working, after finding the computers would not boot from a cd, and I made some progress installing it. I was reminded that Linux installation always seems to have a problem with partitions; the installer is incapable of resizing partitions, and gparted is fritzy, so I boot back into windows to free up space on a partition, then will reboot to ubuntu to try again. Minor progress on the bom and also the fab drawings.

March 18

Starting in the design stuff. First, the review of the 3d model, then we can export to dxf for and, check the scaling, combine the dxfs into a single file in librecad so they can be cut from a 4 by 8 sheet. Andrew is presently increasing the polygon count, too, so those circles and stuff are a little more circular, as I noticed some of the holes on the CEB press are clearly polygons after cutting, although I suppose this is small fries, it is something that it would be nice to address for the future, to improve the cost to performance ratio in some cases. Actual round holes are a useful thing.

Export from sketchup to to-scale DXF file is now complete!

File:Soil mixer-pulverizer march 18 sketchup to dxf CAM files.zip

The orthographic views of the weldments are exported too, the next thing for them is to dimension them. That shouldn't take too long in Inventor. LibreCAD doesn't snap to the lines in the drawing, so the dimensions come out with long strings after the decimal point based on how closely you could get your mouse cursor, and you can't edit the text after, it just becomes lines.

But now we move to infrastructure stuff, mainly whitewashing that hotel room.

March 17

Design stuff in the morning was mostly spent getting Inventor working, looking into importing Sketchup files, reading about Geometric dimensioning and tolerancing, and investigating libreCAD for use in dimensioning the outputs of the sketchup to DXF converter tool. The afternoon infrastructure stuff entailed removing the rest of the adhesive from the front windows, cleaning up around the microhouse, painting much of the interior of the MH, then we did some consultation with Marcin on the design, and turned to domestic labor, getting food, firewood, etc. Later in the evening Andrew and I had a closer look at the 3d sketchup model and found a number of errors that we were glad to catch at this stage, but it means we should go over the model to double check things. I suspected this would happen, but it's not really regression, just part of the development process, I think, here. Not like loosing a file or something. We should be checking each other's work anyway, and expecting errors, especially when trying to shimmy a program like sketchup into the role we want it to fill here, and with all of us relatively inexperienced users of the software. Certainly not in all cases, but I think much more so than is usually assumed, teamwork of this sort can overcome the need - and mean real need, of course they would be able to do things faster, but as long as we get there in a reasonable time frame - for more experienced people.

march 16

My log entries keep disappearing, for reasons that are unclear. Some kind of conflict with the multiple tabs open. Anyway, today we cleaned the hab lab and got personal stuff done. One issue that has come up is the presence of CCA wood in the wood fuel pile, and therefore probably arsenic in the ash of the furnace and campfire. According some research just now, http://www.noccawood.ca/docs/ccawood.pdf indicates that a 12 foot long 2 by six contains enough arsenic to kill 250 adults. So I had to think for a second when I saw Andrew vacuuming up ash around the fireplace, releasing a cloud of it into the hab lab. It has probably happened before, though.

Otherwise, I have gotten Inventor mostly working, about 6 days after I first started trying, we cleaned up the hab lab, set some mouse traps, collected non cca wood etc. I have been trying to encourage recovery from my cold as much as I can, too. The time consumed by the tiredness is infuriating, indeed. I have been reading on dimensioning and tolerancing, and hope to learn and do some of that for the soil pulverizer this evening.

march 15

Turns out I actually have a cold, I realized last night, probably accounting for the voice and unusual level of tiredness recently. Great timing. From prior reading on the subject, apparently one of the only known orally consumed things that helps is 500 to 1000 mg vitamin C, if taken within 3 days of the onset of the cold, which going by the onset of the voice symptoms, is already passed. Normally I take 500 mg per day of Vitamin C for that very reason; so that the times that I do get a cold, I have been taking it, before it is too late, not having known whatever was wrong with me was a cold. The other thing is zinc nasal spray, but it has the side effect of a relatively high risk of destroying your sense of smell, permanently. Echinacea, the other preparations in the pharmacy, don't actually help address the tiredness, actual viral infection etc. I went into the pharmacy once and looked up the ingredients on the labels of all the nostrums. I suppose a cough suppressant might reduce transmissibility. I am coughing very little anyway, though. They usually resolve in seven to ten days but some can last for up to three weeks.[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold#Management

Done the final review modifications to the sketchup file, and exporting all parts to .dxf files. They are uploading now, the file named "Pulverizer anthonyd mar15 8 40 pm 2013.zip "File:Pulverizer anthonyd mar15 8 40 pm 2013.zip(the wiki can only upload a single file at once, apparently, and indeed give errors if you try more at a time by opening multiple upload windows) Next we need to dimension it. We take the weekend off, but I wanted to do this as an exercise, partly; the thing is this is the sort of thing I normally do on my weekend, learning things and trying to check things off my todo list. It only took about 40 minutes so not too bad; otherwise I focused on advancing things that I can't do during the weekday 9 to 6 hours. I went to the shop to see if I could repair one of the bicycles for quick trips into maysville, and found that there is a bike in nearly working condition, just the front tire needs to be pumped up. Couldn't find a bike pump, though. Will have another look tomorrow. I discovered exercise equipment in one of the side rooms of the hab lab, and moved some of the equipment from the grain silo in there, so we have a compete kit. It brings to mind something someone printed out and left on the table here, the integrated human page from the wiki, advocating for, among other things, a balanced life style. I have not been exercising explicitly since I got here, really. Our bodies are a reflection, in part, of the lives we live, our history, so this heralds regression in my fitness levels, unless I can get a good exercise routine worked into my days here. The weights will really help, certainly, but in practice there is nothing like an actual gym, I know from experience. The intensity of the exercise can't practically be matched, it is mainly a matter of the geometry involved with applying an optimal level of resistance to the various muscle fibers over their range of motion.

Inventor is downloading yet again. Error after error, data corruption, incompatibility, their silly download manager complicating things by breaking down, amazing. They should just use bittorrent.

March 14

Something has malfunctioned with this wiki page, as my definitely saved entries for today have gone missing. I will have a look at the history later to figure it out. Anyway, in summary, we spent till about 2 on domestic labor, including cleaning and buying food, and taking a break to say goodbye. The afternoon was spent on whitewashing, painting, removing tape adhesive and other infrastructure stuff. Then we did a final design review of the latest soil mixer/pulverizer prototype. The slated changes are still slated, but I have gone ahead and extracted dxf files from the sketchup file for the parts that will not change. I will then go and export the changed parts, it shouldn't take long to change things and export them. Then we proceed with the dimensioning, to produce a set of drawings for fabrication here on the farm. The drawings will not be super fly, as it is for use here in the prototyping process, mostly. For example, even the plate parts should have edge views, but that would take twice as long to export the files, and it took me about 2 hours just now, and there is very, very little use for drawings of the side of a part made from a plate of uniform thickness when you have the face drawing and thickness.

Announcement to all others at OSE: Just know that my voice seems to be giving out. I'm pretty sure it is from all the talking, and near shouting. I noticed we tend to have to speak loudly due to background noise. I have probably put out more sound energy in the last week than any week of my life, I think! I seem to remember that it is very important to rest your voice when this happens, or you risk permanent damage. So I absolutely must talk less. When I do speak I will have to speak more quietly, too. Also I will try to use signals and gestures instead. I noticed I make the gesture for "I can't hear" a lot, the hand by the ear...:)

March 13

Last day for most of us present here. Yesterday Andrew, Marcin, Catarina, Chris and I talked about continuing to volunteer here longer, because Andrew and I do not need to return to school as the others do. The plan is for the two of us to continue to accomplish things here on the same schedule, of CEB press in the morning, and infrastructure expansion in the afternoon, until the end of April, which is absolutely great. I was uncertain and didn't want to seem clingy, probably I went too far with that, but it is a fascinating, incredibly worthwhile and rich project here, and I was very much hoping I would find there were opportunities to continue helping to advance it, and all the learning by doing that goes along with that.

todo: Finish the pulverizer/mixer fabrication instructions for the overall and rotor, this includes adding some pics and the note regarding the relative position on the tines on the tine modules and a few other things (if the tine modules are identical, then the tines will all line up, which is not really what we want.) Doing this gives me a head start on doing the other parts, so I have that on my personal todo list and hope I won't have to jettison it, due to things on the list that I have committed explicitly to doing. Also included herein, is to get the drawings done thus far up on Dozuki. Inventor is done downloading, so I may be able to do something useful with that, too.

The afternoon will probably be lime washing and painting, and progress on the microhouse.

links or list for documents I have added to thus far, to be linked to for easy locating later, for now these are place holdersj: The dozuki fab instructions guides and the wiki pages that are linked to from the master development board/spreadsheets for the soil pulverizer/mixer tool. http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Soil_Mixer_Design_Rationale

I've got most of the parts exported to dxf, and will do the modified ones tomorrow. I am taking a moment to note here, though:

March 12

Got an error message when trying to install the 32 bit version of Inventor, which took since yesterday to download. The 32 bit version won't run on windows 8, so I need to download the 64 bit, back to square one. The importance of having your means of production with you or handy. Andrew had a similar problem, not having his SolidWorks with him. Probably because he never used his laptop to with it.

The morning was spent progressing on the fabrication plan for the soil mixer/pulverizer. This is particularly helpful as it helps iron out some off the design details, such as the manner in which the tine modules interface to the rotor shaft etc. They can be found linked to on the wiki through Dozuki under "build instructions" for the overall and also for the rotor module. I would greatly prefer to add some images, but the feature to add images to the wiki of the existing pulverizer to make things more clear to the reader, and also for Dozuki was not functional at the time, though it seems to be working now for the wiki, so I may revisit this later.

The afternoon was spent moving the swimming pool (parts), limewashing, cleaning at the microhouse, moving lumber and other small tasks that add up.

Very interesting discussion around the fire last night, as you might hope when people who are interested in a project like this come together.

Tuesday, March 11

Morning design. Eric and I measure the tines modules and the more critical rotor dimensions, so he can model it in scad. I document the process itself, in Process used march11 2013 to model an object for concept sketch in scad [1]. My abilities in Inventor are too limited for now to do this in a reasonable time frame, I think, but I will download a copy now so I can try to draw things tonight. I decided to focus on other things until now, since there are others in the group who can draw well, to be the most effective team player I can. I still need to get the pictures I have taken up non trovebox, I was hoping to do so this morning, but the internet connection was down.

This afternoon I spent mostly on preparing the exterior wall of the hab lab, then limewashing it, and painting the interior with the yellow.

Monday, March 10

We made good progress in the design of the pulverizer/mixer, essentially settling on the high level design and finishing the 3d sketchup model. Going out to see the stuff was a great aid, and seemed to inspire and catalyze thinking in the group. In the afternoon I and some others focused on finishing the microhouse interior walls, with the chicken wire and plaster/pearlite mix. I returned in the evening and did another batch, timing myself it took 28 minutes to mix and apply a batch of the plaster mixture, we will certainly be done the lower layer tomorrow, then there is a final finish layer. I am going to bed now immediately after this, entering the log entry and eating, I think, as I have been getting increasingly sleep deprived over the past week. Yesterday and today I tried to remove the ton of malware on this computer with avg free, malwarebytes and the online trendmicro software, which have helped, but there is still something interfering with the browser severely.

Sun Mar 9, 2014

• Pulverizer and mixer design session in the morning.
• Afternoon work included cutting plywood sheets w/ table saw with Coltan, painting the boards, then helped mud up the cracks in the micro house, moving some scrap metal and helping with the dishes. One interesting thing was the difficulty of stuffing the mud into cracks and against the wall due to it's failure to stick well, then the discovery later in the day that mud near the fire was far stickier and would have been a great labor saver. It shows the importance of a brief practical exploration period. Another thing that made a huge difference, which I expected probably existed, was the technique Marcin showed us to get the mud in the walls; take a trowel with mud piled on it and force it against the wall with another, with the first trowel held underneath.