Slashdot Mirror

Open source is the answer.
But I don't mean that in the way that zealots commonly do these days.

I mean that when a company starts abusing its customers the answer is to beat them using open source hardware and software as a stick.
What did Microsoft fear? Linux. In fact, they probably still fear it. You try to collar a dog or leash a tiger because you know what they'll do if you don't control them.
What does Oracle fear? Free databases. So they bought MySQL and are trying their best to run it into the ground.
What would John Deere fear? Cheap tractors that people can bodge together in their shed.

The point of Open Source hardware or software isn't to make the world's best and most perfect things-- though in general I do really like open source software on its own merits.
The point is to keep a fire burning under any corporation or other kind of authority lest they get complacent or start to abuse their position.

Open source movement isn't necessarily a communistic slogan-- though some do use it that way.
It's truly about empowering the market and innovators: stand on giants' shoulders and come up with a better mousetrap!
And this is the attraction of 3D printing; the dream that a sufficiently motivated individual could earn their own living rather than enduring the rat race.

Abusive authority hates it when "the people" don't need them and can make their own way. That's the point of authority and abusive relationships after all: to have someone to right rough-shod over.

To learn who rules you find out who it is that you're not allowed to insult.
To learn how to break the power of tyrants find out what it is they don't want you to have.

Open source project for a Mechanical Engineer? Wow RTFA.

Open Source Ecology is one of several open source projects that almost certainly would enjoy having a mechanical engineer's help. Look around and you'll find other such projects; open designs are definitely a thing people are trying to get developed and out.

This is the sort of thing that prompted Open Source Ecology's open-source hardware - the vital machines of civilization, built from collaboratively updated open source blueprints, made to a modular design from off-the-shelf parts. Know FreeCAD? Welding? You can make a tractor. I've seen one of the initial prototypes, and it was doing the job.

http://opensourceecology.org/g...
https://www.ted.com/talks/marc...

Their current push is open-source homebuilding, but it builds on all of the machines they've made. https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

In my estimation, this is one of the most important open source projects of all time. This stuff is maintainable and built without planned obsolescence. We need that kind of freedom at the base of civilization.

http://opensourceecology.org/

There kind of already is, Global Village Construction Set. They share 50 vehicles & machines which is what is needed to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts:

http://opensourceecology.org/g...

I spent nearly 15 years in IT before returning to the family farm to work with my brothers. We farm several thousand acres of irrigated land with some large, expensive machines, so I have some experience in this. This article really hits home for me. Forgive some of the jargon, but this is slashdot; you can deal with it.

Coming from the open source world, computer technology in farming, both in the machines themselves, and the software farmers use, is like stepping back in time 20 years or more. Farm software is a niche market, and companies are pretty jealous of their profits. So mapping software is very expensive and interoperability is a bit difficult. Right now I can pull maps off my machines (Case, John Deere), but they each use different native formats so if I want to do any work in QGIS I have to use the company's individual software (which ironically enough is DRMd even though it comes for free with the machine) to export the data in SHAPE format. Software packages like the SMS mapper can read some manufacturers' data files directly because they licensed the formats. But there's very little info out there on hacking these formats and very few open source hackers know enough about farming and these systems to bring expertise to bear.

Even worse, all the companies are talking about cloud-based mapping solutions, but that's even more proprietary and closed.

Companies talk about "open standards" but what they really mean is they export SHAPE files from a computer program. It's really frustrating, but with interest in UAVs, perhaps people will finally crack this barrier.

As to the machines themselves, there are a number of issues. One is government regulations. Adjusting the timing as the farmer in the article wanted to do is extremely illegal and can get you a huge fine from the EPA if you are caught, which you will be. Because unlike in the automotive world, there aren't a any third-party repair shops with access to the parts, let alone diagnostic equipment. Apparently the EPA requires the manufacturer to report any deviations from the the approved program, and they levy fines. Sounds orwellian, but the EPA doesn't mess around when it comes to pollution regs (and I'm okay with that in theory). Suppose the manufacturers want to cover themselves.

Someone asked why a company can't spring up to develop hackable machines? There are efforts to this effect.

http://opensourceecology.org/

But for larger scale farming, it's harder. In the case of engines, the EPA would simply never allow them to market if the parameters that cause an engine to meet EPA regs are allowed to be changed. Regulatory capture has made modern diesels so expensive to develop now, including licensing patented pollution control technologies like the urea injection systems, that it's cheaper for companies to buy an existing engine than to develop their own. So even if I started a hackable tractor company I'd still need to use an engine with an extremely proprietary ECU, and would have to license canbus info to simply connect a transmission to the engine.

The other part of machines that is jealously guarded is the main canbus that links everything on the tractor. We're talking engine control, transmission control, hydraulic remotes, cab systems, and most importantly, the GPS receiver, guidance computer, and steering valve. The commands that flow on this bus are not yet encrypted (they will be soon, starting in cars I predict), but they are highly proprietary and protected by NDAs. You'd think that with a modern tractor I could take anyone's GPS receiver, mate it with anyone's guidance computer, and control any tractor's steering. Well it's not like that. On John Deere, for example, if I want to use anything other than GreenStar for GPS and guidance (a $10-$20k touch by the way, plus yearly fees for RTK), I have to physically replace the steering valve system with one that the 3rd party system is compatible with. There was a company that rev

A number of years ago, I ran across a similar effort to develop a self sufficient system of tools and technologies to support a "town" called the Global Village Construction Set. It is found at http://opensourceecology.org/w... and it may be an interesting read for anyone thinking about these kinds of issues.

Who would ever think you'd use a baked feather pillow for hydrogen storage ???

http://opensourceecology.org/w...

How are we going to harness tech and knowledge to create a better world for our children and grand-children?

Is it really an improvement to have machines such as the ShapeOko: http://www.shapeoko.com/ rather than teaching children how to use a set of carving gouges, chisels, saws, &c.?

Is it inevitable that we will see the banning of commercial fishing as commercial hunting was out-lawed during our grand-parents' day?

What technologies or organizations are there which offer options for making the world a better place?

  - http://opensourceecology.org/ --- and their ``global village construction kit are one bright light --- arguably the ShapeOko has a place in that though.
  - http://www.heifer.org/ --- teach a man to fish and all that

Projects / charities to address that:

  - http://www.heifer.org/ --- give a child powdered milk and they'll drink for a day (if they have clean water), give their parents a breeding pair of cattle and they'll have milk for forever
  - http://opensourceecology.org/ --- provide people with the tools necessary to make the things they need to make their lives better

Had a link for a water filtration system, but not finding it....

What I am seeking is a long-lasting low loss storage.

The long lasting appears to be Nickel-Iron but it is expensive and lossy.

The low loss high energy option was supposed to be EESTOR but perhaps they are in the same isle as the flying cars.

How about this:

Open Source Ecology. A lot of work has gone into this.

Very interesting, thank you!

Well, since refugee's are usually fleeing their home country the problem probably exists outside your ability to gracefully intervene. Your solutions are pretty much limited to maintaining indefinite refugee camps, shipping the refugees elsewhere (if anyone will take them), or granting them citizenship or at least work visas so they can become contributing members of their new country of residence (with all the problems that causes to the local labor markets). Or of course getting deeply mired in the internal politics of your neighbors who have already been shooting at each other for years. Not really a lot of good options there.

Oh, I'm definitely not saying that there are any good options, just questioning the wisdom of attempting to design 'temporary housing' if your actual use case ends up being north of a decade long. 'Temporary' usually comes with substantial tradeoffs(either in price, if it's the good stuff, or in quality, if it's the cheap seats). Those are generally worth it if 'permanent' or 'semi-permanent' are overqualified and overpriced/hard to remove for the job because you are only expecting people to be staying for a week, or six months, or whatever. If your realistic timescale is actually ten years, solving the problem with 'temporary' gear probably means you'll end up solving it three or four times over(if you are lucky) and having everybody living in squalid, leaky tents the whole time.

My(intended, I may have expressed it poorly) point was not so much 'If people are spending 10 years in refugee camps, UN=fail, shape up!"; but "If TFA says that the average stay is 12 years, shouldn't the design effort be focused not on incrementally improved 6-month tents; but split into 'short', 'medium' and 'long' SKUs, possibly with 'long' being not a set of modular buildings to be shipped in; but some sort of on-site mud-brickulator machinery(along the lines of some subset of the global village construction set)? Or, alternately, some attempt to design a short-term system that, either through addition of parts, or cannibalized for parts, has a smoother upgrade path than contemporary short-term designs do."

I'd imagine that there is a strong incentive for everyone involved to pretend that any given situation is purely temporary, it'll be over shortly; but I suspect that maintaining that illusion might be leading to sub-optimal allocation of resources and design efforts that are aiming at the wrong goals.

And there's a TED Presentation for those post apocalyptic net-surfers.

These guys have the blueprints to go from nothing to somewhat modern. The site goes through mining and metal extraction and refining to building useful machines from plows to 3D printers.

See: Coffee can foundry to Casting and so on to the Global Village Costruction Set of 50 machines designed to make modern life possible.

And there's a TED Presentation for those post apocalyptic net-surfers.

These guys have the blueprints to go from nothing to somewhat modern. The site goes through mining and metal extraction and refining to building useful machines from plows to 3D printers.

See: Coffee can foundry to Casting and so on to the Global Village Costruction Set of 50 machines designed to make modern life possible.

And there's a TED Presentation for those post apocalyptic net-surfers.

These guys have the blueprints to go from nothing to somewhat modern. The site goes through mining and metal extraction and refining to building useful machines from plows to 3D printers.

See: Coffee can foundry to Casting and so on to the Global Village Costruction Set of 50 machines designed to make modern life possible.

And there's a TED Presentation for those post apocalyptic net-surfers.

These guys have the blueprints to go from nothing to somewhat modern. The site goes through mining and metal extraction and refining to building useful machines from plows to 3D printers.

See: Coffee can foundry to Casting and so on to the Global Village Costruction Set of 50 machines designed to make modern life possible.

These guys aren't some lunatic fringe apocalypse survivalists. Their target market is the third world.

They're designing tractors for people who are doing their plowing by hand.

When they refer to survival they are talking about people who already dying.

When they refer to "building civilization" they are talking about giving the worlds impoverished something else to do with their time other than subsistence farming.

TFA completely misrepresents what these guys are doing. Check out their blog.

Four years ago "You wouldn't pirate a car would you?" was an absurd parody of itself; now replicating an army of RPG miniatures isn't really stretching the imagination.

Not only is the answer for a car "Hell yes! I would if I could.", but here is a place you can do it legally:

http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Wikispeed_SGT01

IIf at some point in the future some genius invents a device that allows us to make copies of things for free, I would support people's right to do just that.

We are working on it ( http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set ), but it will not be a single device, at least not in the near term. It will be an "ecology" of devices that will make parts for each other. That is because ceramics, metals, plastic, wood, etc. generally need different processing techniques, and it's not easy to put that all into one device. But nothing stops you from having a large workshop with various machines, and then a robot does the assembly at the end, and have it all driven by a single 3D object file.

As a practical matter, there will always be some parts you have to buy. For example, you won't be replicating what intel does in it's factories any time soon. But you can place bought parts on storage shelves for the assembly robot to grab when it needs them. What needs doing is lots of grunt level design and programming to make the "ecology" as closed-loop as possible and minimize the bought items.

I doubt people will be fabricating farm equipment or trucks, but it is not unreasonable to think that people might fabricate a small car for city driving.

Actually, they are fabricating farm equipment. You can download the plans at http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/LifeTrac

Farm tractor is one of the first things Open Source Ecology built because the founder had a farm and a broken tractor. Eventually they will have a full range of machines. It's an ecology rather than a 3D printer because you need different machines for different tasks and materials. But the outputs from one machine feed into building the others in a network.

  I've made a drill press, and am starting on modular construction (because you need a place for the workshop), to be followed by a sawmill and other woodworking machines, to cover the whole tree --> finished wood products chain. The main OSE group is doing the metalworking and hydraulics side of things at the moment.

Plans will be here when they finish them:

http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Open_Source_Car

Open Source Ecology is developing a "construction set" of machines, including ones that can build parts for other machines. It's an "ecology" rather than a "3D printer", because a single device can't do everything yet. So you need a different machine to make plastic extrusions than to machine metal, for example.

I've made an early version of a drill press, and am starting to document it. Other people can take my design and improve on it, like with open source software. Eventually all the key machines will be programmable, so that you can hit "print" from a set of downloaded plans, and the various machines will start spitting out parts, which a robot will assemble. There will always be some parts you can't make, like CPU chips, with a reasonable set of machines. Those you go buy, but 90% self-made and 10% bought beats 100% bought.

No, there is another way to abandon the system, and that is internally. Imagine you own a farm, so your food is taken care of, and it has a well equipped workshop, so you can make the rest of your stuff. Income for tax purposes is near zero (you would sell some food or furniture or something to cover the stuff you can't make on your own). Now, assume the farm equipment and the shop are automated, so you don't have to spend a lot of time running them. Corporations and government get very little from you this way, so you have more or less abandoned the "system".

In reality, one person can't really do this on their own, there is too much specialized knowledge needed, but a community farm and a community workshop, where multiple people contribute their skills and share in the products could do it. Even better is open sourcing the plans how to do it, especially how to bootstrap your equipment - using the tools you have to make better tools. I'm at the early stages of doing that. I have a bootstrap drill press almost done, and will open source the plans for it ( started here but a lot more to finish it: http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Bootstrap_Drill_Press ). With a drill press, I can make pieces for modular construction of a workshop. Add a sawmill ( http://woodgears.ca/bandmill/backyard_milling.html ) and the production chain now goes back to raw logs. If we can make buildings for ourselves, we can say "fuck you" to the whole banking/mortgage industry. There will still be things you need to buy made elsewhere, but self-production can cut that down a lot, and not paying interest saves even more.

There is a much bigger issue looming on the horizon ( 100 - 400 years) though that you will want to ponder -- what happens to "value" when anyone can simply "print" whatever object they want? =)

You might want to drop a couple of zeroes from the time estimate. There's are projects to open-source the core hardware manufacturing equipment like a plasma torch: http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/CNC_Torch_Table Once you are able to automate general production tools (lathe, milling machine, drill press, etc), you can then make more specialized tools, which in turn make the end products. It becomes a matter of software (CAD files) to produce all the parts. Some stuff, like computer chips, are too specialized to make locally, but it is quite feasible to do 80% today in a community fabrication shop. At the present state of technology, a generalized fab will not fit in your garage, but it should fit in a medium warehouse. That will improve over time just like computers once required large rooms for a single primitive version.

Besides the parts making machines, you also need materials handling (overhead cranes, robotic carts), and assembly robots, and lots of software. For now, it won't be hit "print" and an inkjet printer sized device spits out another printer, but a warehouse sized shop will be able to make all the parts for another shop. That upends the economics of the physical world the same way file sharing upends the economics of digital content. Making paper books or prints of movies on film reels is a linear process, it takes the same amount of work to make each copy. File sharing and self-copying fabrication shops are exponential.

Getting back to the discussion topic, that is also why SOPA will fail even if passed. Takedowns are a linear process. It is limited by how many people are working to detect the websites, get to a judge to order the removal, etc. File sharing distributes an exponential number of copies of whatever people want, so will always win that race. If necessary, the sharing will go on offline, by portable hard drives and pirate wifi hotspots (share with anyone in range, but not on the internet), but it will still be exponential growth as long as one person can share with at least two others.

We're working on copying tractors.

http://opensourceecology.org/

They are working on an open source set of machines to bootstrap modern civilization for anyone who wants it. The founder lives in a cordwood hut, so I don't think there is much in the way of overhead. I've contributed to the wiki, and am starting a local Do-it-yourself association/hackerspace ( http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Community_DIY_Gadsden ) to bootstrap the tool set in my area (between Atlanta & Birmingham). I like that people can participate, not just write a check and forget about it till next year, and empowering post-scarcity economics in the physical world is a worthy goal.

Marcin Jakubowski has an excellent TED talk on helping this exact issue: Open Source hardware called the Global Village Construction Kit.

Sounds more like "shared source" design to me, a collaboration between 50 companies. Nothing seems to be open to the public.
Unlike for example the Global Village Construction Set. http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set/
"Open Source - we freely publish our 3d designs, schematics, instructional videos, budgets, and product manuals on our open source wiki and we harness open collaboration with technical contributors."

I would assume you're referring to Open Source Ecology: http://opensourceecology.org/

If projects like the Global Village Construction Set achieve their goals, communities could establish their own industrial base to pursue big goals. Maker culture (and open source before it) has achieved some amazing things, like affordable home 3D printing, and it's accelerating. The failure of government and business to achieve big goals could be seen as an opportunity. What goals would you pursue?

Hi, I know these guys have FOSS driving all the electronics on their FOSH. http://opensourceecology.org/

Here's one project that might ease your worries:
http://opensourceecology.org/