Scaling Development

We’re now moving onto the next phase of GVCS development, beyond the work at Factor e Farm to a global collaboration of remote prototyping work funded by crowd sources and resource development via the nonprofit sector. We are collecting bids from global collaborators at the same time that further development and production is occurring at Factor e Farm, starting with 3 orders of the brick press – tractor – soil pulverizer. Our next steps are fabrication automation with tools like the CNC torch table for cutting parts and precision multimachine for fabricating  motors and engnines, which allows people to replicate our machines from CAM files, shared globally and built locally at a fraction of the cost of closed-source counterparts.

It seems that this year will be a great step forward as the several early adopters prove the feasibility of our products. We predict that many will follow as the machines are proven in the field and as CEB houses are built.

One subject matter expert that we have recruited from Berkeley, California, is Dan Granett, who runs  a design and prototyping shop. His background includes precision machining, and Dan has helped us years ago by initial design of the Tesla turbine, which was since superseded by the modern steam engine on grounds of efficiency.

Dan will be leading the precision CNC multimachine effort, which includes a mill, drill, and lathe, plus a surface grinder attachment, plus cold-cut an abrasive saws. We will add value to open design of high-performance hardware by developing low-cost, heavy-duty (2000+ lb of force), precision (1 mil) x-y-z drives based on open source dove-tails, precision acme, digital readout, and microcontroller feedback for backlash correction. Dan will be one of our first experiments in scaling the technical development of the project via remote prototyping collaboration.