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"Sometimes the best way to get people to help you do something is to just start doing it wrong in front of them."

A project log for The Metabolizer

A living recycling center that eats trash and sunshine and poops recycled plastic objects

sam-smithSam Smith 08/31/2018 at 20:350 Comments

Welp, I done got chip dropped. These woodchips were free, and came within 2 days of me requesting them through chipdrop.in. According to my calculations, this pile has a net energy content in the ballpark of 2000-2700 kWh, which would be enough to power my entire house for over 100 days, or roughly equivalent to 50-70 gallons of diesel fuel. 

Of course, that's if I were able to convert 100% of that energy into useable electricity and useful heat, which isn't actually possible. But Combined Heat and Power (CHP, sometimes called co-generation) systems have been known to reach efficiencies above 95%, by utilizing the waste heat from producing on-site electricity to do useful things like heat hot water. Right now I'm more concerned about being able to measure what my efficiency actually is, than I am with how high it is.

A wise person once told me, "Sometimes the best way to get people to help you do something is to just start doing it wrong in front of them." My goal with this project is to demonstrate that a self-powered trash-eating robot can be built, I want to be able to accurately measure how well my system is converting trash into power, so that I can challenge other people to build their own versions and beat my high score.

I would like to design the most efficient system I possibly can, but I know that I'll never be as clever as Everyone is. The beauty of Open Hardware is that once people catch onto an idea, they begin to freely modify it to suit their needs, and you get all kinds of different solutions to the same problem. But too often (I feel) these modifications, forks, and improvements are under-documented, or buried 6 pages back on some obscure forum, and hard to find, hard to collect, and hard to compare.

So instead of creating the most efficient machine possible, I'm focusing on creating a package of accessible information that makes it easy for people to build on of these machines themselves, and then measure, collect, share, and compare their results, so that we can all collectively work towards an optimally-efficient design.

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