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