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November 2020 Project Update
10/26/2021 at 02:43 • 0 comments[UPDATE 10/21/2021 -After 2018 I started posting my updates on my Patreon page, and so I'm filling in the back-logs for this project retroactively so the whole story is in both places. You can also read all of these posts with their original photo formatting here]
November 30th, 2020-
Happy full moon everyone!
As it gets colder, I find myself thinking more and more about how to generate heat, without burning propane. During the Summer, I got my new design for the biochar reactor dialed in and did the first test batches, turning wood and waste biomass into charcoal.
I have been mostly focusing on how to power a generator using the gas driven off in the process of making the biochar. But once the batch is finished, the charcoal that comes out of the reactor also embodies an incredible amount of energy.
It's even possible to convert this charcoal back into a flammable gas, so that can be used to power internal combustion engines. (Check out this guy, who converted a mini-van to run on charcoal). But doing that can be tricky and I haven't quite gotten there yet, and as a form of simple portable heat, charcoal can be incredibly powerful.
You can think of it as a form of incredibly stable, cheap, non-toxic energy storage.
Before burning it, I filtered out the chardust, and sprinkled it onto some woodchips in my garden, leaving the larger pieces of charcoal behind. Any biomass, like dry leaves, paper, and cardboard, can be turned into biochar, but the char it produces is flaky and turns to dust instantly. This dust can block the passage of air between the bigger chunks, and keep it from getting the oxygen it needs to burn, so its best to sift out the dust before burning.
Doing this ended up looking a lot like a mushroom spore print, which is fun because the Metabolizer has the same metabolism that a mushroom does, and this micro-char will help facilitate the growth of mycelial networks within this wood pile as the chips decompose. The finished soil will hold onto this Carbon, sequestering some it from the atmosphere.
I fed the rest of the charcoal into a small portable fire pit designed for burning wood pellets. Once it got going, it made a nice, warm, smokeless fire, that lasted for hours.
By my calculations, the char that I produced and then burned had energy density of AT LEAST 10-15 kilo-watt-hours.
It's incredible to think how much solar energy is embodied in all the leaves, sticks, and yard debris that fall all around us every year. And it makes the fact that what most people do is load it all up into bags and pay a big fossil-fueled truck to drive to their house and haul it away to who-knows-where, seem even more insane.
Thank you all so much for your support, and stay warm out there!
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September 2020 Project Update
10/26/2021 at 02:41 • 0 comments[UPDATE 10/21/2021 -After 2018 I started posting my updates on my Patreon page, and so I'm filling in the back-logs for this project retroactively so the whole story is in both places. You can also read all of these posts with their original photo formatting here]
September 30th, 2020-
Hello dear patrons! To be honest, this month has been a rough one. Nothing instills a sense of impending doom quite like a week of breathing poison air. The wildfire smoke that choked the west coast made it hard to do much of anything for a while there, and I spent a lot of time this month thinking about the incredible power of biomass.
At the beginning of September, a small group of friends went out camping in the Alvord Desert in South-eastern Oregon, over the week that Burning Man usually happens. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Burning Man culture, there is a tradition to build a giant wooden structure called the temple, where people write their hopes, and fears, and grief, and loss, and whatever else in sharpie on the wood, and then watch that structure burn on Sunday night. It is a powerful and cathartic experience that is difficult to describe.
This year, with Burning Man cancelled and an extreme burn ban in place for all of Oregon, we opted instead to make a mini temple out of wood scraps, and to not burn it. Instead, I packed all the bits back to Portland, and loaded them into my Biochar Reactor, to make into charcoal and energy, which seemed fitting.
Someone asked me while we were in the desert why I was "so into biochar" and the question gave me a chance to articulate something that I hadn't previously been able articulate. Biochar is all that remains when all of the volatile organic compounds have been driven off from any formerly-living matter in the absence of oxygen. Biochar is pure carbon, embodied sunshine, proof that something has both lived, and died.
It is the ultimate symbol of death and rebirth. The pores in charcoal hold onto essential nutrients, like phosphorus, potassium, and nitrogen, that plants need to grow, and it keeps those nutrients from washing away with the rain. The char itself is not actually consumed by plants, but it provides the perfect physical substrate for nutrient retention and bacterial and fungal growth, so that new plants can sequester more atmospheric carbon, and generate new biomass, which in turn can be made into to new biochar.
One of the big problems that I've been trying to solve with this project has been how to utilize biomass energy effectively and efficiently. I've been able to run my little harbor freight generator using the syngas produced from making biochar for over 2 years now, but the process is impractical- I have to pull-start the generator every time, and the electrical power is only available while the engine is running. Also, I have gotten the generator to run on the direct output of the reactor, but it doesn't run fast enough to kick into "output" mode, which means that I need to store and pressurize the gas first, which complicates things significantly.
In order to be really useful, and not just a proof of concept, the process needs to be significantly streamlined, so that the engine could just start itself whenever the battery gets low, and efficiently charge a DC battery bank, just like a solar panel does, so that the energy produced can be stored for when it's needed in a fully off-grid system.
So naturally, I took my generator apart to see if I could find a better way to get power out of. It turns out that the generator I have (and all "inverter" style generators) uses essentially the same kind of brushless DC motor that electric bike wheels do - because brushless motors make very efficient motors AND generators.
On a hunch, I bought an open source electric motor controller called a VESC (A FSESC6.6 to be exact) and hacked it into the actual generator part of the generator, to see if I could spin it using just battery power without using the pull-start at all.
It's kind of a crazy idea, but turns out it actually works! I was able to crank the engine just by giving signal to the motor controller, instead of using the pull-start, effectively turning it into a remote-start generator, which is neat!
But what I'm really interested in is that the FSESC controller also has a 60 amp regenerative braking feature, designed to let an electric bike recharge the battery by using the motor as a generator. Since I already know the generator can be used as a generator, I'm hoping that this means that with the VESC I'll be able to electric start the generator, and then efficiently charge the battery with the regenerative braking feature once the engine kicks on under biomass power, which would be a lot more efficient and less dependent on engine speed than using the onboard electronics.
Unfortunately I haven't been able to try that part just yet, but I'm hoping to in the next few days.
This approach still needs a lot more testing, but the initial results are really intriguing. If it works, an approach like this could make biomass energy a lot easier to integrate into an existing off-grid solar power system, and allow people to generate power while reducing their wastes to biochar!
Thank you all so much for your support, and a big thanks to James, for helping answer all my questions as I got the VESC set up. Stay tuned for more updates!
Onward!
Sam
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August 2020 Update
10/26/2021 at 02:38 • 0 comments[UPDATE 10/21/2021 -After 2018 I started posting my updates on my Patreon page, and so I'm filling in the back-logs for this project retroactively so the whole story is in both places. You can also read all of these posts with their original photo formatting here]
August 30th, 2020-
Hello, dear Patrons! This month I made some really major progress on the new version of the Trash Printer, that I started prototyping back in April. I've completely re-designed the gantry so that it uses 100% open source parts, and optimized it for 2D cutting rather than 3D printing, so that the parts can be laser-cut out of wood or acrylic in a fraction of the time it took to print the old parts.
Whereas the old Trash Printer gantry took around 70 hours of 3D printing to make a full kit, the parts for this new design can be manufactured by a laser cutter in about an hour.
The parts can be cut out of a wide range of materials, using a wide range of tools, depending on what you have available. I'm prototyping the parts with 1/4" plywood, which ends up being remarkably rigid and cheap. All of the parts can be cut out of about $30 worth of hobby plywood.
The design is still a work in progress, but things translated from my Sketchup design to real life way more smoothly than I expected, and I was able to mount the motors, control board, and lead screws, and get the whole thing moving. I haven't gotten a chance to print anything yet, but once I wire a up a few cables I'll be ready to give it a shot!
Speaking of getting things printing for the first time, my friends over at the Trash Hackers Collective recently got their own replication of the Trash Printer up and running, and printed out these little vases as their first test prints! This is the first independent replication of the Trash Printer design, and it's exciting to see the idea finally spread beyond my basement! Replication is the highest form of flattery.
Prototyping wooden parts for the Trash Printer generates a fair amount of waste. Each iteration creates a set of obsolete parts and lots of small bits of scrap. I realized that I could feed this waste biomass to the Biochar Reactor and turn it into charcoal and energy! So I've been using the scraps and old parts to test the new reactor. A full batch takes about 3 hours to fire, and consumes about 2-4kwh of electrical power.
I've got the reactor setup fully mounted to one of the LOVE trikes, so it can be moved as needed. Each part of this project is creeping closer to being able to function as part of a whole system, which can travel around the city, generating energy from waste biomass, and using that energy to shred and 3D print waste plastic into new stuff, like a living trash-eating meta-organism!
Thank you as always for your support in this crazy endeavor!
Onward!
Sam
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July 2020 Project Update
10/26/2021 at 02:36 • 0 comments[UPDATE 10/21/2021 -After 2018 I started posting my updates on my Patreon page, and so I'm filling in the back-logs for this project retroactively so the whole story is in both places. You can also read all of these posts with their original photo formatting here]
July 31st, 2020-
Hello dear patrons, I hope the odds have been ever in your favor these past few months. I haven't made a post in a while, mostly because so much has happened it's been hard to sit down a make a real update.
Back in May I used most of my stimulus check to buy a whiskey still from AliExpress to see if I could use it as a biomass reactor. My hope was that this reactor could simplify the design for people wanting to replicate the system, since it requires no fabrication or welding. After testing it quite a bit, I can say that it works way better than the original design, and is much easier to work with!
The new reactor is about the size of a beer keg, and has double-wall steam-jacket and a bunch of ports for adding heaters and sensors. I added two 600W 1/2" heaters, and started experimenting! Being able to use electrical heat makes it very easy to quantify the energy the process takes, with very high accurately.
On my first run, I found that with about 4kwh of heat, I could make about 16oz of charcoal, which has an energy density of about 8.8kWh. But that material wasn't completely dry, and the reactor wasn't completely full, so I still need to do more testing. I ran a patio heater at full blast for 3 hours with the gas produced by the reaction, and was able to run my generator on the gas, and use the electricity it produced to power the Precious Plastic Shredder for the first time, but only for a few minutes. The generator currently takes a little more gas than the reactor produces, at least with a 600W heating element.
The feedstock was a bunch of plywood scraps I had left over from prototyping the new trash printer, and it turns out that when you turn plywood into char it retains it's original shape - at least until you touch it and then it shatters into a million pieces. Good char shatters, that's how you know it's good.
I also collected this lovely "bio-crude" during the condensation process. Most of it is probably water, and the stuff that isn't water are hydrocarbons of varying lengths, some of which, if refined, could be used as fuels and chemical feedstocks - but I haven't gotten that far yet. Mostly I'm just collecting mason jars full of liquid that smells strongly of campfire.
I have also acquired these LOVE-ly tricycles from a friend. The LOVE trikes were built as an art project for burning man 2012, and have been kicking around Portland ever since. They needed a new home, so I've taken them in, and have begun to outfit them with ecological infrastructure. So far I've mounted a solar panel onto one with a battery and inverter system, so that it can act as a mobile power station.
Last Saturday we took them out to a rally against police violence at Peninsula Park and rode with the march to the Portland Polices Association building, where we used them to block traffic while a friendly road crew of courageous public safety workers painted ABOLISH in large friendly letters on the street.
Now I'm working on adding solar-powered lights, a sound system, and eventually all of the Metabolizer infrastructure- Shredder, Reactor, Power Station, and Trash Printer, onto each of the trikes, so that we can ride them to where ever mobile, deployable, off-grid, open-source infrastructure is needed.
Thank you for your support! I'm planning on using the money from this month to improve the condenser system for the Reactor, in order to make it lighter, cheaper, and more mobile, and to buy the supporting hardware to get everything mounted to the new trikes. If there's anything left over, I'll upgrade the lights!
Onward!
Sam
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March 2020 Project Update
10/26/2021 at 02:33 • 0 comments[UPDATE 10/21/2021 -After 2018 I started posting my updates on my Patreon page, and so I'm filling in the back-logs for this project retroactively so the whole story is in both places. You can also read all of these posts with their original photo formatting here]
March 31st, 2020 -
Hello Dear Patrons! I hope this update finds you in good health! Like many of you, I've spent the last 2 weeks doing my very best to stay as far away from all of you as possible. While I've been trying keep my urge to be maximally productive during a global pandemic in check, the extra time at home has given me the opportunity to make some exciting progress that I'm excited to share with you!
First off, I've just uploaded the latest episode of "The Gentler Apocalypse", the podcast I started with the very talented Finn Graves, to SoundCloud. Finn and I recorded the first 2 episodes of the Gentler Apocalypse back in late December, and in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic, we believe visions of a gentler apocalypse are needed now more than ever! If you find yourself with some extra free time this month, give it a listen and let me know what you think, and what you want to hear more about in future episodes! And stay tuned for Episode 4, coming next week!
I work at a local TrueValue hardware store, and due to the pandemic we've been out of N95 masks for weeks now. As an exercise in distributed design, I decided to see if I could print a mask from trash! I modified this design slightly so that it would print well with the trash printers large nozzle, and was able to print a remarkably comfortable mask frame in about 5 minutes!
Not an earth-shattering innovation, but a promising proof-of-concept for how trash printers could be used to create useful objects directly from locally available trash! The large nozzle of the Trash Printer allows it to crank out a mask in about 5 minutes, much faster than a typical 3D print, making it comparable in production time to injection molding, without the need for an expensive mold. The plastic I used for these masks came from Polypropylene test tubes, and the heat required to melt the plastic is well above sterilization temperature (260C/500F).
I was able to print and assemble 6 masks in an hour, most of which I gave away to my co-workers at the hardware store. Which is pretty neat! But the ability to do this in my basement isn't really particularly world-changing. My vision for the Trash Printer has always been to make it something that other people can ACTUALLY REPLICATE. I want to see this technology actually being implemented by other people, and so far the barriers to replication have been a bit too high. I'm working hard to fix that.
I got the original prototype of the Trash Printer working almost exactly one year ago! A major barrier has been that the gantry I'm using isn't my own design, isn't fully open source, and isn't specifically designed for trash printing. The MPCNC I've been using also requires nearly 60 hours of printing time, and so I've been trying to design my own version of a gantry, so that I can release the full plans for the WHOLE PRINTER, and not just the extruder, which I think will make the whole build a lot less daunting. For the past few months I've been refining a new design for the trash printer that uses laser-cut parts instead of 3D printed parts, which can be made much more rapidly, with a much wider range of materials, on a much wider range of tools.
All of this time "social distancing" has allowed me to refine this concept to the point where it's finally ready for real-world testing. While the design isn't particularly pretty, its extremely versatile, allows the use of lead screws or belts as the drive mechanism, and uses low-cost and widely available parts and materials.
All of the parts can be laser cut out of just 3 sheets of 12x24" 1/4" plywood, or any comparable sheet material, using a laser cutter, CNC router, or they can be printed with a desktop 3D printer. The shapes are simple enough that one day I hope to be able to cut or print them using this gantry itself, so that once built a trash printer could trash-print more trash-printer parts.
That dream is still a ways off, but it's also closer than it's ever been! This month, I've spent your money buying the final parts and materials I need to dive into real-world prototyping of this new Trash Printer during April, to see what works and what needs more work. Once complete, this new design should be easy to fabricate, have a build area of 2.5x2x2 feet, be fully open source, and cost between $500-800 to build.
Thank you, as always for supporting this work so that I can keep making my designs fully open-source, and stay tuned for more episodes of the Gentler Apocalypse, and the full design files for the first prototype of the Trash Printer V4 in April!
Onward!
Sam
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February 2020 Project Update
10/26/2021 at 02:27 • 0 comments[UPDATE 10/21/2021 -After 2018 I started posting my updates on my Patreon page, and so I'm filling in the back-logs for this project retroactively so the whole story is in both places. You can also read all of these posts with their original photo formatting here]
February 29, 2020
Happy leap year, everyone! This month I spent your money installing the Metabolizer at the Portland Winter Lights Festival! This was the first time I've been able to deploy the entire Metabolizer system outside of my backyard.
The weather was awful, with sustained winds of 15-20mph during setup on Wednesday and Thursday, which hampered my efforts to install a more complete version of the canopy system I had hoped to try out.
Still, all things considered, the installation went really well! Ultimately, the goal is to build a canopy that can fully enclose the entire structure in these triangular panels, and shelter it from wind and rain so that it can house the Trash Printer and Shredder. For PWLF, I was only able to install the first ring of panels. Still, the panels held up admirably to the heavy winds, and went together without too much difficulty, once I figured out how to hang them from the structure.
On Thursday evening we were able to run the generator for the first time without using a gasometer to collect and store gas. This was the first time I had tried this approach, and I was a little surprised that it worked at all. However, due to the lower gas pressure, the generator never reached a speed where it could output useable power.
Between the rain, lack of shelter, strong winds, and large crowds, we ultimately decided to not to try and run the Metabolizer on Friday and Saturday nights, and opted instead to use LEDs and informational signage to demonstrate the flows of energy and material through the system.
Although I was a little disappointed to not be able to not be able to show the whole system running this time around, the demonstration version was a lot easier for people to engage with and understand, and we had a great time showing off the system and Trash Printer on Saturday Night.
Overall, it was a great test of the deployability of the system, and it gave me a lot of good information on what needs to be worked on to make the system more functional and more easily deployable in the future.
For next month, I've started working on a new design of the Trash Printer (Version 3), built around a cheap and widely available harbor freight service cart, which gives it a much larger Z axis, and a completely redesigned XY gantry, so that the system can be fully-open source.
Currently I'm using some else's design that is partially closed source, and while it's easy to build and cheap and I still recommend it, a fully open-source system will make documentation and replication much easier in the future. The enclosed design allows for the chamber to be heated, which helps with warping and adhesion issues, and also makes fume-mitigation easier.
Thank you, as always, for your support, and thank you to everyone who helped out and volunteered during Portland Winter Lights Festival! Thanks for letting me keep doing this work that I love!
Onward!
Sam
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January 2020 Update - Coroplast Hurrah!
10/26/2021 at 02:23 • 0 comments[UPDATE 10/21/2021 -After 2018 I started posting my updates on my Patreon page, and so I'm filling in the back-logs for this project retroactively so the whole story is in both places. You can also read all of these posts with their original photo formatting here]
January 31st, 2020
Hello wonderful patrons! This month I've been hard at work getting the Metabolizer ready for the Portland Winter Light Festival!
My goal for the Metabolizer has always been a fully open-source waste-to-everything system that can turn trash into useful things, like electricity, warmth, hot water, 3D printed objects, and good vibes.
This installation will be my first attempt at actually doing that! And since it's winter, a pretty essential part of that installation is making a canopy that can shelter the Metabolizer from wind and rain.
So this month I spent your money buying the material to build a prototype of a universal canopy system I've been working on for a while. The panels in the picture above are light, cheap, and can be configured in a lot of different ways to make different shapes.
They're cut out of coroplast sheets, which are widely available and made out of Polypropylene, which means I can recycle the off-cuts and feed them to the Trash Printer.
I was up late last night cutting out the panels on my friends GIGANTIC laser cutter. Each panel takes about 3 minutes, and I have about 150 panels....soooo... I still have some more to do.
But if you're in Portland, come check out the Metabolizer at the Portland Winter Light Festival, February 6, 7, and 8, just south of OMSI, and you can see them for yourself!
Thanks as always for your support, and stay tuned to see how it all comes out!
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December 2019 - Here's to a Gentler Apocalypse
10/26/2021 at 02:19 • 0 comments[UPDATE 10/21/2021 -After 2018 I started posting my updates on my Patreon page, and so I'm filling in the back-logs for this project retroactively so the whole story is in both places. You can also read all of these posts with their original photo formatting here]
December 31st, 2019
Hello dear Patrons! If you only read one of my messages this decade, make it this one! I've been working on a lot of stuff recently, and finally have a lot to show for it! This update comes with a full-length movie about this history of the Universe, a full tutorial video on how to build the Trash Printer Extruder, AND the first episode of a new podcast!
Let's go!
First up, my friend Finn Graves and I have been working on a new Podcast called "The Gentler Apocalypse", the first episode of which launches TODAY on SoundCloud! Finn is a rad tattoo artist out of Vancouver, WA! Whilst getting tattoos on my arms this Spring, I coped with the pain of being stabbed multiple times per second by ranting about how cool solar panels are, and we decided that we should start a podcast, so we did! Check it out here !
Next, I've been hard at work making better and more detailed documentation for the Trash Printer, which, it turns out, is hard work! I just released a full 30-minute tutorial on how to build the extruder, which is Part 1 in a 3-part series on Trash Printing! Your support made this work possible! Big Thanks to Dave Hakkens for demonstrating the power of great documentation.
You can find the full video HERE and the updated tutorial, complete with cut-files HERE
Some of you may know that in addition to building trash eating robots, I've also been working on an immersive, hour-long music video about the history of the Universe that I call "Overview". This has been my back-burner "why-am-I-even-doing-this?" art project for the past 5 years, and it's finally kinda sorta actually done. I will be presenting it after my Light Science talk ("Trash Eating Robots and the End of the Anthropocene") during the Portland Winter Lights Festival in early February, exact dates TBA.
Got an hour? Watch the full version of Overview HERE!
FINALLY, tomorrow I will announce which of you lucky Patrons is the winner of my first-ever raffle for this lovely trash-printed mushroom lamp! Not a Patron yet? You still have time to become a Patron by midnight tonight! Stay tuned!
Thank you all so much for your support!
Happy New Year!
Sam
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November 2019 Update
10/26/2021 at 02:16 • 0 comments[UPDATE 10/21/2021 -After 2018 I started posting my updates on my Patreon page, and so I'm filling in the back-logs for this project retroactively so the whole story is in both places. You can also read all of these posts with their original photo formatting here]
November 30th, 2019-
Hello dear Patrons! November has been a very productive month! Here's what happened:
First, I successfully printed my most complex part ever with the trash printer- a 12" tall mushroom lamp. I found the model on Thingiverse, and wanted to see if I could get it to print on the Trash Printer. The biggest challenge was that most of my prints to date have been "spiral vase" style prints, which means that the extruder just moves in a continuous spiral for the entire print.
Spiral vase prints are fast and easy, but if ALL you can print with a printer is spiral vase parts, it limits the usefulness significantly. Since the trash printer extruder oozes a lot, stopping it and moving it can cause problems. I dialed in the settings in the software, so that it would give "extra length on restart", so that it would pause and feed extra material after a move, and that worked pretty well! I still had to watch it pretty closely, but it worked and thats a really good sign!
Next, I printed out all the parts I need to build an entirely new Trash Printer from scratch, so that I can record a full, step by step tutorial video. I uses this awesome sparkly purple filament we got from Proto Pasta at Maker Faire.
Now I'm just waiting on some pulleys and lead screws to arrive, and I can film the whole build one go. Look for that video by the end of December!
Finally, Claire and I collaborated to make these awesome jewelry bits out of recycled PLA! We got a few sheets of recycled PLA that our friends from the Trash Hackers Collective had made from failed 3D prints and defective filament, and we used the t-shirt heat press I bought a few months ago (with your generous support) to press diffraction film onto the sheet.
Diffraction film is made from PET plastic and has a much higher melting point than PLA. The film has tiny microscopic ridges on it that give it that rainbow effect, and when you heat-press the film onto the PLA sheet at around 400F, the PLA melts, but the PET doesn't, and the PLA makes a mold of the ridges on the film and becomes diffractive as well! The film is not destroyed in this process and you can just rainbow-ify recycled plastic over and over using only heat and pressure.
Neat! And it turns out you can do this with Polypropylene as well! This makes it really easy to press shredded trash into rainbow laser-cuttable sheets, and then cut those sheets into any shape you want.
Finally, I've decided to raffle off this mushroom lamp to one of my randomly-selected Patrons at the end of December! If you're already a patron, you're already in the running, and if you're not, you can enter by becoming a patron for any amount before December 31st!
See y'all next year!
Sam
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October 2019 - Trash Eating Robots and Where to Find Them
10/26/2021 at 02:11 • 0 comments[UPDATE 10/21/2021 -After 2018 I started posting my updates on my Patreon page, and so I'm filling in the back-logs for this project retroactively so the whole story is in both places. You can also read all of these posts with their original photo formatting here]
October 31st, 2019
Hello Dear Patrons!
Thank you for supporting the development of open-source trash-eating robots! This has been a crazy month and a lot has happened! In the first week of October, Claire and I set off on a 3-week West Coast tour in the Magic Tool Bus. First, we landed at Arcosanti in Arizona for their 3rd Convergence event.
There we did a demo of the Trash Printer, and I made my first ever "print" using HDPE and a new extruder design.
Unfortunately, as with all first drafts, the design needs more work to be consistent, but this is at least a promising first step!
Next, we headed out to the Ecosa Institute for Ecological Design, where I did a talk on open-source distributed infrastructure!
Last week, we presented the Metabolizer at the Institute for the Future's "Age of distributed super powers" conference, which was a blast!
Our exhibit wasn't open until the big reveal on the second day of the conference, so I spent most of the first day tuning and calibrating the printer. I had been having some annoying motor issues, which I finally diagnosed as faulty wiring, and I rebuild the wiring harness, and it worked much better, just in time. I was able to print my first fully functional part: A wind/water turbine that I attached to a stepper motor so it would light up LEDs when it spins.
Now that the printer is working better, I'm going to focus on content production over the course of November, and work on posting educational media that teaches folks how to build the Trash Printer, since my existing documentation is still a little thin. Now that I know what works, it's time to make better documentation!
Stay tuned for more updates next month! And please share this link if you would be so kind!
Onward!
Sam