The Metabolizer

[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, 2021

Since I first started this project, my goal has been to demonstrate a system that can use sunshine to turn organic wastes into biochar, using the gas generated in the process to generate electricity to power a waste shredder that shreds up waste plastic that is fed into the trash printer, turning sunshine and waste into biochar, energy, and 3D printed plastic objects - a complete metabolic system nourished by trash and sunshine.

Over the past 5 years, with your support, I've gotten all the pieces of that system working individually, and now it's time to put them all together. 

This month, that meant putting a lot of things BACK together. Last month, I had fully disassembled the biochar reactor in order to try out a new design I've been working on, one that I hoped would make it easier to build, more efficient, and easier to operate. The first test, however, did NOT go so well. My thinking went like this:

If I insulate a 5-gallon metal bucket, and I put the heating element inside that bucket, maybe I can nest another 5-gallon bucket full of biomass fuel inside it, and that would make it possible to load and unload batches of biomass like fuel cartridges, 5 gallons at a time. It would make the whole systems SO much easier to use, instead of having to scoop out the charcoal every time.

In order to distribute the heat, I filled the bottom of the bucket with Zeolite pellets, a type of dessicant make from alumino-silicate clay. My thought was that the zeolite would get hot and transfer the heat of the burner to the nearby metal.

Unfortunately, that's not what happened. What actually happened is that I accidentally made lava. It turns out the zeolite is INCREDIBLY INSULATING, which seems obvious in retrospect, and it built up so much heat that it melted the zeolite into glass, and melted the nearby aluminum foil, which shorted out the heating element.

BAM. Lava. The good news is that all that really happened was I burned out my heating element, and got more than a little discouraged. But I used my Patreon budget to buy a new heating element and try again. This time, no zeolite. 

And this time it worked! Better than before, more efficient, easier to load and unload, and easier to measure the inputs and outputs. I ran a test using raw, VERY wet douglas fir chips, to see how well the system dealt with that level of moisture.

It turned out to take a lot more energy than usual, 8.1kWh in total, and it only pyrolized half the batch. In the process, it generated around 1 cubic meter of syngas, which I used to power the generator for about an hour in total, generating 250 watt-hours of power, a new record! It's not much, but even with extremely wet material I was still able to get an energy in to energy out efficiency of nearly 3%, which is also a new record for me.

I've begun putting together the final 3D model for how all the parts go together, which will become the basis of the documentation for how to build one. I'm hoping to make the initial release of the reactor documentation by the end of the year.

Now that the reactor is working, one of the final pieces is to get the trash printer running on the power produced by the generator. So I spent the last part of this month rebuilding the trash printer, which has been out of commission and in storage since the beginning of the pandemic. 

The wiring was a mess, and the table I was using was too big. So I had to take it all apart, transfer it to a smaller table, replace the Z motors, and mess with it for hours, but I finally got it printing again.

The Trash Printer, it turns out, when printing, takes about 160 watts. With the 250 watt-hours I generated, I could print a cup, bowl, vase, or turbine, which all take 1-2 hours to print. Now that I can finally measure these numbers, I know for sure that putting all the parts together is indeed possible. Now I just need to figure out how to do it!

Thank you for your support! I absolutely could not do this with out the support you all provide, giving me a budget to experiment and try new things and learn how to do this crazy thing better and better. Thank you! See you next month!

[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 31st, 2021

This month I spent some time making some final tweaks to the design of the reactor. I've tried a bunch of different configurations at this point, and in general the design works quite well, and it can reliably produce gas clean enough to generate energy with. 

But I wanted to make a few changes based on what I've learned so far to make it a little more modular, more efficient, a little easier to use, and cheaper to build.

I've revised my parts list for this new configuration, which you can find here. Keep in mind that this is still a draft, but it's getting very close to being a stable build. 

First, I've learned that firing a whole batch of charcoal currently takes between 5-8 hours, which is a pretty long time. I decided to test out a configuration where I added extra insulation, and used steel 5 gallon buckets packed inside the reactor.

This change will let me pack burnable material into 5-gallon buckets, and load them into the reactor like fuel cartridges, which I hope will make the whole process of operating the reactor a lot quicker and easier. It reduces the volume of char you can make with each batch a bit, but it should also reduced the time it takes to cook a batch to around 3-4 hours.

I also bought a set of 1.5" condenser tubes to try out instead instead of the 2" ones I'm currently using, because they're a lot cheaper and if they work just as well, then it will make the whole reactor design a lot lighter and cheaper by using 1.5" fittings instead of 2".

I also figured out how to configure the condenser parts in a way that is a lot stronger than my original design, which allows the reactor to be oriented horizontally as well as vertically, and is just generally a lot sturdier and easier to move around. It makes it feel like a lot more of a thing instead of a collection of parts.

Unfortunately, whenever I pull the reactor apart to make upgrades like this, it puts it out of commission for a while, and so I haven't been able to make much charcoal recently, or play with fire very much.

My goal for this coming month is to get this new configuration up and running and do some tests, and based on what works and what doesn't, start building the documentation for the first stable release of the reactor.

Thank you all so much for your support! Stay tuned!

[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, 2021

For months, I've been on a quest for cold hard data. What I ended up with this month was more like soft, warm data, but hey, you've gotta start somewhere. For the first time ever, I was able to measure all the inputs and outputs of my biochar reactor to make one batch of biochar. Here are the quick results:

IN:

Biomass in: 3.3kg

Moisture Content: Unknown, dry

Electrical Energy Consumed: 8.7kWh

OUT:

Charcoal Out: 1.8kg

Liquid out: 550mL

Electrical Energy Generated: 140wH.

Syngas Produced: 1400L

The feedstock was just the woody remnants of last year's yard-work: Dried out hops, wisteria, and clematis vines, blackberry brambles, weeds, grass, and sunflower stalks. I've gotten into the habit of just drying out my yard waste by leaving it in a big bin in front of my house's heat pumps, using the waste heat to dry it all out, and then throwing it into the biochar reactor.

I have always been curious exactly how much biomass energy is available just from the stuff that grows on my 1/10th acre lot in Portland, because it seems like kind of a lot. I still don't know exactly, but I'm getting a lot closer to knowing. 

I weighed the bucket empty to establish a tare weight, then used a luggage scale to measure how much biomass I had. By compacting this dry, low-grade  woody biomass waste into a 7-gallon turkey fryer bucket, I was able to collect about 3.3 kilograms of biomass. Then I loaded it all into the reactor, sealed it up, and heated up the heating element, using 1128 Watts total. 

In about 45 minutes, I had filled a 300L gas bag with gas,

Over the course of the afternoon, the bag filled up with 300L of gas roughly every hour, and every time it filled up, ran the generator for 7-9 minutes, producing between 250-400W on average from roughly 300L of gas. Later, I tried using a larger, 500L bag, and found that I could run the generator for nearly 30 minutes on one 500L bag.

When I turned the reactor off that evening, the temperature read 850F, and 8.71kWh had been consumed. That means that the system consumed 8710 watt-hours, and generated 140 watt-hours, roughly a 1.3% conversion. Not great.

But not bad either, considering its my first try and the purpose of this project isn't ONLY to produce energy. 8.7kWh is an amount of power easily generated by 3-6 solar panels over the course of a sunny day, and the byproducts of the process also include waste processing, biochar production, water heating, and gas production, in addition to electrical power. So 1.3% as a first try ain't too bad.

Most of the time, when the generator was running, it was producing between 250W and 400W - about as much as a single solar panel does in full sun. On gasoline, the thing is supposed to generate up to 1800W. But the energy-content of the syngas varies depending on the feedstock, temperature, and a number of other factors.

The low conversion efficiency is most likely due to the air-fuel mixture inside the generator. Getting the pressure and gas volume just right has been a tricky business. The new gas bags I got are cheap and very easy to work with, but they require some kind of pump to pressurize the gas. The booster pump I was using worked pretty well, but topped out at around 400W.

Unfortunately, the gas booster pump I had been using ended up getting clogged with tar and stopped working. Ultimately, that's a filtration issue, indicating that the gas needs to be cooled and scrubbed more before it gets stored. I've ordered a few filters to try, and a few new pumps.

When I bypassed the pump, however, and just leaned my weight onto the bag to provide pressure (later calculated to be roughly 15psi) the generator fired right up, and I was able to generate damn near 1000W as long as I kept my weight on it, which is very promising. Internal combustion engines are most efficient near the top of their speed range, and so making the generator run faster probably makes it significantly more efficient.

When I opened the reactor the next morning, I had 1.8kg of charcoal! A lot of the leafy grasses broke down into a fine carbon powder, which I added to my compost heap, but the larger softwood vines had retained enough structure to use as drawing charcoal, or for burning as cooking fuel.

All in all, the experiment yielded 1400L of flammable gas, which was considerably more than I had expected. My estimation is that I would need about 4000L+ of storage (about 8x500L bags) in order to contain a whole batch worth of gas. With that much storage, you could dump a days worth of solar power into the reactor, converting waste into char and gas, and then burning the gas during the night as need for heat and power. 

To test that setup, the budget for this next month is mostly going to go towards a big portable battery system that will be able to power the reactor and be charged by solar panels, so that I can start running more of these experiments completely off the grid, gaining the energy required to maintain the process ENTIRELY from sun and biomass, and seeing what kind of results I can get!

Stay tuned!

[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]

June 30th, 2021

Hello Dear Patrons, and welcome to another monthly update.

It was 116 degrees in Portland this weekend, a new record for as long as we've been keeping score. I feel like I've been preparing for this kind of thing to happen my entire life, but it still comes as quite a shock when it does actually happen.

I don't know really know what to say or make of it just yet, but I invite you to let yourself feel the reality of it sink into your bones for a moment, while that feeling of 'way too hot' is still fresh.

For the rest of all of our lives, no matter what any of us do, the weather will become increasingly inhospitable. There will be heatwaves, cold-snaps, hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, and floods.  But that doesn't mean that what we do now doesn't matter. It means that what we do now matters a lot.

But what, exactly, do we do? I can't tell you what the right thing for you to do is, but I can tell you that I have asked myself this question many times, and the conclusion that I've come to is this:

Everyone has a different opinion about how they think the world should be, and we don't have time for everyone to agreed about it, nor is that likely to happen, ever. But there are certain things that all humans will always need, and so it makes sense to just focus our energy there first.

Food, water, shelter, energy, waste. No matter what happens, come hell or high water, any information that helps people meet the basic needs of the people around them, using the things they have around them, will always be useful information.

I called this page "disruptively useful" not because I think the stuff I'm working on is currently disruptive, but because I am convinced that there is such a thing as disruptively useful information - information that is so useful that it can actually change the way people do things, simply by being available to them.

If you and your friends can build something useful that helps you take care of each other, and you share that information so that other people can build that thing too, then that information can spread around the world faster than it ever has before. The potential and need for us to change how we do everything has never been greater.

So if we're going down, let's go down swinging for the fences. If we're shattering world records for temperature, let's shatter world records for how much carbon we can sink into the soil, how much plastic we can pull from the oceans, how many people we can care for the people around us using nothing but wind, rain, trash, and sunshine.

This month, on the hottest day of the Holocene, after the sun finally set, I set two small personal records. I ran my generator for 26 minutes, unassisted, on the stored biomass-gas alone, for the first time. I also learned how to auto-start the generator with just one button for the first time.

Not a world record by any means, but a personal best.

This coming month, my goal is to finally be able to measure ALL of the inputs and outputs of the biochar reactor. These numbers will mark a milestone that I've been working towards for a long time - the ability to quantify exactly how much carbon this system can pull out of the air, how much trash it can decompose in the process, and how much solar power it can convert into useful energy.

Those numbers probably won't be great, or at least, they will probably need to be greatly improved before they become disruptively useful. But to know for sure, I need to find out what those numbers are, so that I can set new records, and break them, and invite other people to break them, over and over again, until we're setting world records, and breaking them, over and over again.

Thank you for all your support, and remember, all the documentation that I have on this project so far is available here.

Stay tuned!

[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]

May 31st, 2021

Hello dear Patrons! 

This has been an exciting month! At the end of last month, I finally got the generator running reliably on biomass gas, and was able to generate 250-350 watts at idle, with a peak of 700-800 watts when I put the gas under higher pressure. This month, I was able to run a few more experiments, and was finally able to run the generator continuously for over 20 minutes until I turned it off.

This generator produces 24 volts DC instead of 120 volts AC like most generators, which means it integrates really easily with existing systems already designed for solar panels. Here I've got the generator charging up my 2.4kWh lithium battery bank, and I can use that battery bank to power the reactor (700W), or the shredder (600W) or the trash printer (200W).

The limiting factor now is my ability to store the gas that the reactor produces. I can only store about 40L of gas in my gasometer, which can run the generator for about 5 minutes. So I started experimenting with pumping air into the reactor once it was started, in order to generate additional heat and gas, like stoking a fire by blowing on the hot coals. 

I got this special remote control valve so that I could pump air into the reactor without letting the gas escape when the pump wasn't running. This way, I can give the pump and valve 12 volts and the pump will start and the valve will open, and then when I turn off the power, the pump turns off and the valve closes.  

I was able to run the generator for about 20 minutes that way. I also tried recirculating the exhaust from the generator, and that worked surprisingly well, but not great. 

The problem is that doing that dilutes the gas with nitrogen and CO2, which makes the gas less calorific, and throws off the air-fuel mixture in the generator, leading to less power, and less reliable starting. The gas remains flammable and can still be burned in the flame tube, but it doesn't have the energy density the generator needs to really get going.

So, with your support from last month, I ordered this giant gas bag, designed for storing biogas, which just arrived today. These bags are cheaper to buy and easier to use than the gasometer I have been using, and don't require any water to work, which makes them a considerably lighter and more portable option. 

This bag is 0.5 cubic meters, or 500L, or roughly 130 gallons. That should be able to hold roughly 5000 watt-hours of chemical energy, which the generator should be able to convert into roughly 500-600 watt-hours of electrical power.

This coming month, I plan to use my Patreon budget to buy a decent battery monitor and a 24V battery bank, so that I can more accurately measure the energy consumed and produced by the system, and start running the system completely off the grid, using exclusively solar power and power produced from biomass.

Stay tuned!

[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]

April 30th, 2021

Hello Dear Patrons, and welcome to everyone who signed up on or around my birthday! I gained over $20 patrons, bringing my hacking budget up to over $650/mo, a new record! 

Waaaaay back in October, I spent weeks putting together the best proposal I possibly could for the LAGI2020 initiative, a design competition for regenerative structures to be build and tested on the Fly Ranch property in Nevada, now owned by the Burning Man org.

I tried to sum up as succinctly as I could, exactly what it is that would like to build: a fully open-source closed-loop basecamp that can be rapidly deployed and power itself entirely on trash an sunshine, able to meet 100% of the primary human needs of a small group of roughly 30 people, by metabolizing locally available waste biomass and solar power into useable energy for essential needs like lighting, heating, cooling, cooking, washing, bathing, and building.

But I've been sworn to secrecy until after the shortlist of winners had been selected, which just happened this month. My proposal didn't make it on the shortlist, which is a disappointment and a relief, and it is now published on LAGIs website, so you can go explore it there, and while you're there, check out the ones that did get shortlisted, they are DOPE.

Now that the results are published, I can FINALLY share all that work I did with all of you without fear of disqualification. So I would love if you would explore it in detail and see what comes across for you. These are the three design boards I submitted as my proposal.

The thing that I find so intriguing about metabolic systems, like organisms and ecosystems, is that they're an ongoing process, a constant balancing act, something that is always happening. As Buckminster Fuller put it, "I seem to be a verb."

All living organisms, by definition, have a metabolism. But do cities? What about cars? What about rainforests? Whats the difference between them? A metabolic system is any set of chemical processes that is able to sustain itself through time, to grow, replicate, and adapt as needed to keep that process going. 

This camp is research center for an experimental metabolic system, that is arguably alive, at least metabolically speaking. If you don't feed the system, you run out of power, the system reboots, the counter resets, and you have to start all over. The camp itself is a challenge, a platform, a feedback loop that lets people experience what its like to live within a living system, and work to maintain the systems that sustain them.

It would be a platform that small crew of people would have to work together to operate, requiring communication and trust, just like the crew of a ship (or starship).

If a bunch of groups started doing that, and competing with each other to see how long they can keep their system going, and sharing their mods and hacks with each other, so that other groups can replicate the designs that work well, with only open-source tools and locally available materials. If even a few groups of people started doing that, I bet we could get pretty good at it pretty fast!

All of the infrastructure proposed in this design already exists, fits inside a shipping container, and costs between $10,000 and 20,000 in parts. That's a lot of money for one person, but not very much for 15-30 people, especially if those people can then set up that camp infrastructure anywhere and have it meet all of their essential needs.

Phew. So, yeah. That's what I'm trying to do, as specifically as I've ever been able to put it. Thank you for all your support, it's made doing so much of this work possible.

So now lets shift gears to the brass tacks of how do you actually do that. In order to create a camp that can power itself from sunshine and trash, I need to be able to turn waste biomass into useable energy. The biochar reactor I've been working on refines biomass into a flammable gas quite nicely, which is great for cooking, or heating water, but isn't quite as useful as electricity in most cases.

So, I've been trying to figure out how to turn that gas into electricity as efficiently and reliably as possible, with limited success. I can run small engines up to about 10hp no problem, and have converted nearly every engine I've tried to at least run on the gas. But most generators aren't up to the task, and don't put out useable, storable power, and so I had to order this special generator from AliExpress:

This man is a giant, apparently. Months ago, I used my Patreon budget to order this 24VDC generator. This generator does exactly what I was trying to hack my generator to do over last summer, and does it much better, for less money ($608 shipped). It turns out it is the EXACT same engine as the Harbor Freight Predator generator I had already gotten working, so I hoped that getting this one going would be easy, and it was!

I literally just swapped in the other air intake cover I had from the other one, and since they're identical engines it fit perfectly. I got it running on the first try! But I still didn't know how much power it was producing, if any.

After a few tests, I was able to measure my first real amount of power, 34 watt-hours! Not much, but enough to run a string of warm LEDs for an hour, so not nothing either. The generator produced about 250W at idle, and I saw it produce up to 600-800W when I pushed down on the barrel to increase the pressure. Thats really great, because it means the output can be varied, and is roughly equivalent to the output of 1-3 solar panels.

Now I either need to figure out how to store more gas, or how to make the gas faster, so that I can run the generator continuously. The generator can be remote started by remote or wire, so that bodes well for future automation.

Thank you again for supporting this Patreon! This is what I love to do, and I feel very lucky that I am able to do it. Stay tuned!

[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 30th, 2021-

Happy Spring, dear Patrons!

This past month I’ve been grinding away at this enormous project by focusing a lot on power. I started this month by experimenting what I could do with the trash-gas produced in the process of making biochar, besides turning it into electricity. The generator I ordered is still in transit (stuck in the Suez Canal, maybe?) so I’ve been trying to turn my attention to other useful things.

One experiment I did was to see if I could create artificial lighting from the gas, without electricity. I used Coleman gas mantles, and they actually worked pretty well. This is how street lights used to work before the advent of electric lighting.

Next, I tried boiling some water to make some go old fashioned tea. I tried to calculate how long it took boil, so that I could calculate the energy usage. It was a little complicated though, since I had to accumulate the gas and store it in batches, which made it tricky to meaningfully calculate the energy return. Still, I did manage to boil enough water for a few cups of tea, and that’s pretty neat.

And then of course, there’s the option of just flaring the gas, which still looks awesome.

But the ultimate goal of this project is to create a set of machines that can generate useable power from waste, and so an electrical storage system of some kind is going to be a necessary part of that system.

And so I’ve fully redesigned our power system in the Magic Tool Bus, as a te,st of the off-grid energy storage system that I want to design to capture and store the power produced by the generator. These are all components I’ve been selling at Light Harvest Solar for almost a year now, so its really fun to get to use them myself.

You can check out my preliminary documentation on that part of the project on my google drive!

That’s all for now, stay tuned for next month, hopefully I’ll be able to get this little generator I ordered running on trash gas and charging up this system as an alternative to solar!

[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 28th, 2021-

Happy almost-Springtime, dear patrons.

This month's budget went towards the LEDs that we put onto the LOVE trikes for Portland Winter Light Festival! The first weekend of the festival was a wild success, and the second weekend of the festival was wild blizzard that forced us to cancel both of our rides. Still, we got some great photos from the first weekend.

This entire display only takes 40-60 watts- less energy than a single incandescent light bulb does!

We even made it into the Williamette Week's spread about the Winter Light Festival, and the LOVE tikes were in 5 out of the 10 photos.

Now that we know that they work, the next step is get them all running on solar power, and then carting around even more deployable infrastructure.

Thank you for your patronage!

[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 30th, 2021-

Hello dear patrons, and welcome to another monthly project update!

I've made some exciting progress this month on the Biochar Reactor and the LOVE trikes, and have added some new designs for an off grid power storage system to the Power Plant section of the Don't Panic google drive where I'm keeping all my documentation.

Over the past few months, a group of friends and I, collectively referred to as the Future Problems Collective, have been revamping the LOVE trikes with addressable LEDs and mobile infrastructure as a mobile pop-up art installation for Portland Winter Light Festival! We'll be riding the trikes around Portland, visiting the various distributed art installations around the city and generally being nice to people! You can find our routes on this map.

If you are in Portland and would like to join our ride, meet at the Northwest corner of Irving Park, BY 6pm, every night of the event - Feb 5 and 6th, and Feb 12 and13th.

I've also made some exciting improvements to the Biochar Reactor! The Tesla Coil-based ignition system is working splendidly, and has so far it has only exploded in exactly the ways it's supposed to. 

The Tesla Coil provides a constant spark so that as gas begins being produced by the reactor, it ignites and flares as soon as it becomes flammable.

This means that now I can just turn on the reactor and leave it alone, and it will automatically flare the gas through the tube as the default process, and then if I want to, I can redirect the gas to the generator to produce electricity.

The flare tube lets the operator visually confirm that the fuel is flammable and clean before using it for more sensitive things like the generator, which is a really handy feature, and looks dope as hell, if I do say so myself.

I also mounted the reactor on to an 800lb-rated hand truck, so now it's portable! It's not quite ready to carry around with the LOVE trikes and provide mobile heat, light, and power from biomass, but that's the ultimate goal, and it's closer than ever before.

Speaking of generators, I successfully ran my little generator a few times with this new setup, and I even produced a few watt-seconds of useable power, but the pull-start makes it difficult to automate, and the raw DC output of the generator without the inverter circuit was well over 100 volts, which my charge controller didn't like very much.

So, because of your generous patronage, I was able to order one of these DC generators from AliExpress, which should arrive in 20-38 days.

This generator cost around $650 shipped, and it can stop and start itself automatically according the batteries voltage, and/or with a wireless remote. It uses it's generator motor as it's starter motor, exactly like I was trying to do over the summer, but better. 

If it works, it also means a lot less hacking for people like you who may one day want to replicate this system, since this is a product that already exists and should require only minor modification to get it running on biomass gas, rather that the way I was doing it, which was VERY hacky.

Since the Tesla Coil and Trash Printer already run on 24VDC, getting the system charging a 24VDC battery bank from biomass gas would be a major step forward towards a fully trash-powered system.

So I've also begun designing a 24VDC LiFePO4 battery bank, with an inverter and solar charger system, using cells you can get from AliExpress. 

I've learned a ton about building and designing off grid systems like these by working at Light Harvest Solar, and I think I can build a very powerful 24VDC system, with the ability to start and stop the generator according to pre-set parameters. 

This part of the project is still very experimental, but all the files and resources I have for it are available in the Power Plant folder, so feel free to peruse that, but please keep in mind that this design is not yet tested, and is currently just a draft.

As always, thanks so much for your support! Dropping hundreds of dollars each month on random experiments that may or may not pan out would simply not be possible without the budget I get from patrons like you!

Onwards!

Sam

[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, 2020 -

“In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch-Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.”

Happy New Year, dear patrons! What a fucking year it's been. Fuck. First off, if you happen to be reading this on New Years Eve and have nothing to do tonight, I'll be streaming Overview, the hour-long history of the universe dance party experience that I've been working on for years, live on Twitch, every hour, on the hour, until 2021 or until they shut me down for copyright infringement, whichever comes first.

Speaking of copyright infringement, isn't the concept intellectual property lame? Wow. Just, wow. But, if I've learned anything from building open source infrastructure, is how easy it is to forget to actually open up your source.

Source code can be vulnerable, for me at least. It's disorganized and buggy. It's full of mistakes that parts of me don't want other people to see. And it takes a lot of work to write it all down. And besides, why would I take the time to document this version, when the NEXT version is going to be so much better? 

After all, why shouldn't I keep it?

The truth is, not sharing information is easier than sharing it, and thats a big part of the problem when it comes to open-sourcing everything. 

So this year, my resolution is to just start keeping an openly accessible public drive, with all of the documentation and useful information that I have accumulated, and using that as my live lab notebook, including the current models and design files I have, and the best documentation I have, as I make it. 

If you're reading this, you can see and contribute to this documentation folder, which is currently available as a Google Drive folder entitled DON'T PANIC. 

It's an open book, a living document that I will add to and update as my projects evolve, rather than waiting to publish perfect documentation for the perfect version of the thing. If I have it, you have it.

I'll just post whatever I have there for now, and you can do whatever you want with it. Currently it includes a draft of steps to build the Biochar reactor, and a draft of a parts list with links to where you can source the parts, and a few other useful resources. I'll be adding to this drive consistently in 2021, and everyone reading this has comment privileges with THIS LINK.

It is the beginning of what I hope will be just my small contribution to the real hitchikers guide to the galaxy, the sum total of know-how needed for anyone anywhere and anywhen to survive in this universe, an open-source guide for exactly how to build all of the tools we can think of that enable all people to always meet all of their needs and care for the people around them using only the abundant flux of solar energy that courses through the atmosphere and into our veins, pumping iron through our hearts and bursting out of us in a pulsing magnetic flux the same shape as the four generations of stars that died to make us us, and though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

 Thank you for your patronage!

Sam