Adafruit hackerspace series

[Jeremy Ruhland]

https://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/11/12/how-to-start-a-hackerspace/

I was unfortunately unable to make it to the meeting last friday, but I just saw this on hackaday. Looks like they're going to go into 501c-3/tax stuff in later instalments.

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Jeremy Ruhland
Jeremy....@gmail.com
Public Key DEDCE77E

[Paul de Armond]

Part 4: Get It Done is very much on topic.  I'm looking forward to Friday night.  I will be bringing Jim, the guy with the radio control plane with video.

[Martin Passmore]

All very relevant and exciting. I'm still fighting this ridiculous hacking cough so I'll sadly stay away one more time.

For the record, on the topic of the first "who, what?" section of the Adafruit link, I define my core interest as "carbon hacking", with a concentration (if that's the right word!) on soils, ocean energy and transportation. Where a hackerspace could at some time become indispensable to me would most likely be in the area of low-voltage hardened inspection and emergency controls for wave harvesters, where informal fellowship with people having your sorts of expertise might well open doors for stuff I would never find in my normal solitary modes. And conceivably hackers' traditional irreverence would be the sole source of encouragement for promoting my more radical transportation project (Anthony hold your nose...)

What I can contribute, from a generation before Robert's much more current and technical experience, is a lifetime mostly spent in various sorts of maintenance and  fabrication. Shipbuilding, marine engineering (diesel, not much steam), public works/construction, trucking, building a log home, fish plants. Most of it was what my fellow-apprentices in aerospace used disparagingly to call "hammer and chisel engineering" although I did get to do some electrical work later in the game.

The reason I hope this might be useful is that the publications of the Make community typically have what I perceive as a bit of a gap in the expertise level around electronics (way above my pay grade) on the one hand, and mundane old-style DIY larger-item competence such as one would take for granted in the worlds of agriculture or automobile tinkering on the other.

I have no gift for organization, have learned not to volunteer for office. I will be very fortunate if I get to complete most of the stuff I've already started. So I feel my obligation is just to be supportive in as many minor ways as possible.

martin

On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 8:45 PM, Paul de Armond <paul...@gmail.com> wrote:

Part 4: Get It Done is very much on topic.  I'm looking forward to Friday night.  I will be bringing Jim, the guy with the radio control plane with video.

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[Josh Parrish]

Martin, one of the most inspiring comments on all this to date.

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Josh Parrish
360-746-0256
key...@gmail.com

[Martin Passmore]

Josh, that's very kind.

Especially since it's appropriate that I worry somewhat about being an irrelevant fossil, or worse--barnacle (fossils have proven useful)

Back to hauling leaves....

Cheers

m

[mcoulter.ut]

I know how you feel! I often feel like I am a dinosuar. If you need a computer program written in COBOL call me! :-)

Mark

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

[Martin Passmore]

You did better than I did. There was the summer when I thought I should graduate from tinkering with the Timex Sinclair that was in some long-gone store in Meridian Village and took a beginning course in PL1 up at Western. But somewhere between the card-punch monster and the disappointing printout I waited in line so long for, I realized I was way out of my depth....

Would have loved to see the Anonymous movie

I checked this afternoon on a great workspace that's been vacant for a while, but it's now taken. I didn't get to find out the rent. My wife has a remote connection to the group who took it, and in a couple of weeks when she gets back I'll try and find out more. (It's a huge space and they're not rich either)

martin

[Paul de Armond]

Martin, you were not alone.  PL/1, WWSC's idiot control desk and the 029 Keypunch convinced a lot of people to leave computers alone in the early 70's.  I also quit programming because of the way WWSC's computer science department was run. 

That was in 1972, if I recall.  I started programming during my junior year in high school in 1970.  It was the first portable HP.  It was programmed in binary, had 256 words of core program memory and three floating point registers that displayed on a 3" crt. It was essentially a programable calculator.  A year later Wang came out with a similar machine but it used a modified IBM Selectric typewriter for the output.

Pardon my asking, but why waves and not wind or tides/currents?

The Adafruit series will get to the nitty gritty in the next installment, it appears.

Paul de Armond

[Martin Passmore]

Why waves?

I'm drawn to problems where the answer appears to be lurking but nobody can find it.

I grew up sailing in home-made boats where I could go 20 miles across to Wales on one ebb tide in a flat calm without unlashing an oar. The range on a spring tide was over 40 feet. Farther west, the power of waves made an even deeper impression on me.... 

Waves are the most concentrated form of solar energy, and their availability with respect to time pads out the green energy portfolio nicely if connected directly to the grid (south of here). They are potentially also the most destructive, and design needs to account for the rare rogue waves which analysis has now caught up with sailors' lore enough to quantify.

Conventional analysts are dismissive of the potential; the little hacker-germ in me lusts to prove them wrong. (2 TW worldwide)

The problem with tidal barrages is not only their huge size and the limited head available, but the environmental change resulting seems hardly worth it. (It would destroy sailing in the place where I was young). 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-11564284

In some areas like Umiak Pass I could see submarine impellers being very useful, but these dramatic navigation environments close to enough population are rare.

Here on the West coast we have waves which average throughout the year 40kW/meter of energy, or 40+ HP/yard of beach, and more the farther north you go. 

http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/show_plot.php?station=46041&meas=sght&uom=E&time_diff=-8&time_label=PST

Scotland has an offshore testing site  up in the Orkneys with grid access, and at least 3 or 4 fairly large prototypes have been tested. The most successful so far is the Pelamis, and I like the Oyster, but the Anaconda shows a lot of promise although they are keeping one essential detail out of sight.

My take on it is that from the Columbia north, the energy will never come ashore directly to the grid--that's why our wave effort so far is in Oregon. I think the common solution to offshore wind and to wave energy is to separate energy-harvesting from energy-production--send it ashore as liquid fuel. Ammonia is one appealing candidate, and the market there is huge, growing, and dependent upon natural gas (uses 2% of production). The chemistry of recent advances in NH3 production is quite wild and wooly and very promising. And some activists are proposing reducing the already small-and-known risks associated with liquid ammonia by shipping and even using it as urea. (Run your car on pee?)

http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/newenergyandfuel/com/2010/06/15/wind-to-fertilizer-construction-begins/

http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2008/August/Pages/AlternativeFuelsTakingASecondLookatAmmonia.aspx

http://www.spg-corp.com/clean-energy-power-generation.html

(As a soils nut I'm not a big fan of nitrogen fertilizer. But that's the current reality, and the market if we can make it offshore cheaply enough is astounding. And once it catches on as fuel the ag sector can go green without affecting overall demand)

Somehow the mass and vulnerability of structure needed for the harvester has to come down. I would have each exporting energy as pressurized fluid, air or seawater. Once we do that, connecting them in a star topology with an energy-conversion hub set up in a more stable and protected form seems to me the way to go.

There's quite a lot of history behind using NH3 as motor fuel. I originally thought of it as a kinder alternative for the server farms' backup diesels, but there's commercial work going on with gas turbines, for instance as grid backup: storage being the most immediate challenge for green power.

[Press here for STOP!]

martin

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[Martin Passmore]

Paul, thanks for the question. I hadn't known that the Severn barrage had become such a huge issue back home, so I'm paying more attention now. This is a better page on the topic in the unlikely event that anyone is interested

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/may/15/severn-barrage-peter-hain-energy

--so perhaps I'll be less dismissive in the future. (But for my own remaining time I'm going to stick with wave/wind/nh3). And dirt.

Martin

On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 11:33 PM, Paul de Armond <paul...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Paul de Armond]

I'm moving the derail about renewable energy by starting a new thread.

Meanwhile, back to our original programming:

How To Start A Hackerspace: Part 5 – Money and Resources

Money and resources are key issues for all Hackerspaces.

In many instances you’ll find that your resources can come from your co-hackers – someone might have furniture or tools (or they might know someone), or someone in your Hackerspace circle knows how to – or is motivated to – do something that needs to be done. Pull resources from your co-hackers, and when in doubt, ask around. However, don’t expect that you can get everything for free or that the tools and equipment you get as donations will work, or be safety compliant.

Money is fuel for your fire. Here is a list of common costs to expect. These items below are the costs you will have to pay for monthly or semi-regularly, except for project consumables (materials) and maintenance of equipment.