Apart from Hackerspacecraft Operations, on-location hands-on assistance, documentation and orbit maneuvers, a considerable portion of time is invested into open and collaborative R&D with the goal to develop, test, peer-review, produce, evolve and disseminate open, solution-oriented hard- and software, everybody else can verify, copy and build, without having to be a so called “expert” or a lot of money to get something done.
We have long been superseded, in terms of evolutionary speed, by the machines we invented. It should be important to find new strategies, how we as people will cope with the ever more increasing speed of technological progress. Therefore, this lab cannot be confined into the limited reality-space of commercial interests or the outdated and slow terms of academia. We need to freely experiment, share and collaborate, using new and evolving technology, to help ourselves and to enable others to help themselves even faster, by copying, adapting and using available open-technology, based on:
In the beginning (as of in right now), R&D focus is obviously motivated by the project's most basic primary needs, to build a self-sustainable, energy- and infrastructure-independent mobile Hackbase, that allows the crew to survive and to conduct research in a free manner, keeping research & results free and open to many other people all over the world with different goals but similar needs, so that they can also benefit from the experience, we call it: Progress. At the same time, since no money, other incentives or pressure is involved, there is no point in faking/tweaking research data, as it should be.
PiGI - RaspberryPi Geiger Counter | ||
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The PiGI transforms a Raspberry Pi into a handheld geiger counter to measure radioactivity or to autonomously monitor radiation levels and share the data. |
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PiGI Details+Documentation | STATUS | Ready - Waiting for funding/production time |
UCSSPM - Unified Clear-Sky Solar Output Prediction Model | ||
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With help of this open-source model, anyone can now easily estimate the maximum global solar radiation value, on a clear-sky day, for any given time and place on Earth and predict the maximum usable output of a given solar energy conversion system. |
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UCSSPM Details+Documentation | STATUS | Ready - Running long term tests in the VFCC |
Here you can find our primary research & development projects. Of course we have much more interesting topics, we might want to dig in, but time and resources are very limited at the moment. It seems more realistic to focus on a few important projects in the beginning, rather than having an impressive amount of projects but no real results to show for.
An attempt at building a full indoor growlab to experiment with SDG and implement a fully open-source software and COTS hardware stack to steer, automate and monitor any crop. |
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GrowLab Details | STATUS | Work in progress |
A modular stack to create, manage and share Software Defined Appliances (SDA) with ease. governess can be deployed on platforms like the Raspberry Pi or the Odroid family (more to come) and use cheaply available PCB Break-out boards to create any kind of DIY appliance. From there, governess serves as an autonomous bot, monitoring the appliance and running tasks from schedules, RPC or interactively with users, who are connecting via governess client for local and remote operation scenarios. |
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governess Details | STATUS | Work in progress |
NinjaSCC Development and prototyping of an ultra efficient, reliable and resilient off-grid solar charge controller |
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NinjaSCC Details | STATUS | Work in progress |
DSpace aims to enable people to find, collect, edit, structure and share any kind of information in a real-time, massive-collaboration environment (like wikipedia), based on a very common ground: The map of the area these people actually stand on.
Development of a simple combined wood-gasifier/burner (TLUD) using a controlled draft (TLUD-CD) design approach, to increase efficiency and fuel tolerance in order to help lessening the strain on people and environment in developing nations.
Wind is another free energy source, used by humans for a long time. Zephyr is going to be a modular Wind-Park Construction Kit based on simple to construct VAWT rotor types, efficient smart-grid conversion and intelligent Point-of-Load distribution technology.
Concept of a true Universal-Power-Converter with great input/output safety/tolerance and a very high conversion efficiency over the entire input spectrum.
Proposal for a solid, modular & accurate weather/environmental monitoring system to be used by communities (not everyone needs his own measurement equipment in a neighboring area), that offers all data to be displayed locally and collected/used worldwide by creating a network of stations everyone can access to gather independent, coherent & comparable long-term data.
Building and operating Apollo-NG will always be an ongoing secondary R&D process, which also generates results, that could be very useful for other people as a byproduct: