From: Patrick Salsbury (salsbury_at_sculptors.com)
Date: 03/21/00
Message-Id: <200003211018.CAA18162@bootstrap.sculptors.com> Subject: Re: ball connection Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2000 02:18:19 -0800 From: Patrick Salsbury <salsbury_at_sculptors.com>
> > > Your design is nearly perfect for mass manufacture, with
> > sophisticated
> > > equipment. But it's lacking just a bit, for easy prototyping in a
>
> > Thanks. That was my intent (to make it easy to mass-produce,
>
> I could tell. What kinds of strength are required for these units?
> Since
> domes redistribute stresses so effectively, would the hubs need to be
> particularly strong?
I don't know, for sure. I know that domes are strong, but I
figure it's better to err on the side of over-engineering than
under-engineering. Remember that Bucky's first dome was ridiculously
over-engineered when he did it, and still weighed in at about 1/10th
or 1/20th what the nearest competitor technology could provide. If we
have to trim some excess later, so be it. But I'd rather that than
have failures in the field that cause injuries or cost lives.
Remember also that we want to pick these things up and fly
them around, with thousands of pounds of people-stuff in them, and
probably a few thousand pounds of water, even when the main holding
tanks are emptied for transit. There will still be a core supply to
run the fish tanks, aquaponic/hydroponic gardens, and keep the basic
functions of the Living Machine ( http://www.livingmachines.com/ )
sewage and wastewater processing system going.
We need to get some prototypes built, and also to
get some actual engineers to do the stress analysis. I've got some
software that does some of this, but I haven't made the time to learn
how to use it properly. I think I need more engineering and math, too.
If anyone knows of ways to measure, or wants to figure out how to
devise those ways to measure stresses on domes, (and also on
octet-truss frameworks, since those will probably be the floor
supports inside and on the deck outside), please jump in and let us
know!
I'd be happy to provide pointers into areas we could use the
stress analysis, but I just haven't had the time to learn how to do
all this myself.
Man, I hope we get life-extension worked out soon. There's
just SO much to do! :-)
> Let me suggest a few modifications... Unless the strength of steel is
> actually required, an injection molded plastic piece could work for the
> connectors. PVC plumbing connectors are common and
> cheap -- injection molding can reproduce parts like your connector
> with great ease, and by the billions if necessary.
>
> Think of how many PVC fittings are made -- my local Home Depot
> probably has nearly 1/4 million units of various fittings, in stock, if
> you add together all the fittings for all the various sizes of plumbing
> and conduit pipe.
>
> They're definitely manufacturable on the scale we require, and very
> cheaply. PVC is not an ideal material since it degrades in UV, but
> there is a UV stabilized formula, as well as hundreds of other polymers
> from which to choose.
True. I was thinking of something non-corrosive, so aluminum
alloy would be more appealing to me than steel. But I'm also keeping
composites and polymers in mind. Lightweight and strong is good, in
my book.
> > not to make it hard for hobbyists.) Too often, I think that much of
> > housing technology hasn't really advanced because there is so very
> > much craft involved in building. Especially in domes.
>
> Probably true -- though the ability to model things at home is highly
> desirable. :-) Can't fault me for trying...
Not at all! If I designed these to do at home, I'd probably
have half a house built already. But I'm following a specific path
towards mass-production for a reason. I think it's the proper path to
effect the most and best change.
An allegory I like to reflect upon is the work of computer
scientist and mathematician, Donald E. Knuth.
About 15-20 years ago, Mr. Knuth wanted to publish a new book about
math. But the problem was that there were a few different typesetting
and word processing programs out there, and none of them worked with
each other. The fonts from one wouldn't load into a competitor's
product, etc. Finding people who knew any one program was tricky, and
getting them to switch to the program you used (if you were to hire
them as an assistant, for example) was even more difficult.
So he decided to reinvent and overhaul the typesetting and
document preparation industry, and solve his own particular problem
of publishing a math book as a special-case scenario of the general
problem.
He created TeX, which is a program/language for publishing
books and doing typesetting, offset-printing, publishing of
mathematical and scientific symbols & formulae, etc. It was, and is,
completely free. That project spun off the MetaFont project, to
create classes of fonts that were freely available, and worked with
different systems. You didn't have to buy fonts from Adobe or Xerox,
and you could take them with you when you moved to new systems. Or
supply them with your document files, to make sure they looked the
way *you* intended, when someone else printed them out, somewhere
else in the world.
Mr. Knuth published his math book, eventually. In the
process, he revamped the entire publishing industry. You can find out
much more than you ever wanted to know about this by typing 'man tex'
or 'info tex' on a Unix/Linux system, or going to:
ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/texbook1.bib to begin your
journey.
So I see houses in the same fashion. I think the industry as
a whole needs to be reinvented, and my specific housing problems
should be solved as a special case. If I do it right, then I'll have
a prototype of something we can make by the tens of millions, and it
will help other people with their specific problems, wherever they
are.
If I do it like everyone's always done it, by hand-building
and custom-fitting, then I'll have a very nice, cozy place, and no
one else will have benefitted, except perhaps the builders. :-)
> we also have cut to whatever specific lengths are needed. Then you
> just screw the ball onto the end, and viola!, instant strut.
-Making a ball that can screw on will require either very precise
-casting (doable with injection molding equipment, ala PVC fittings) or
-for metal, it will require tapping the balls, and cutting threads in
-the pipe.
-
-A simpler design might be to use something akin to a set-screw, to
-hold the struts into the ball ends. That way the struts could be cut
-on site, if necessary, with no finishing necessary. It could also use
-local materials, even tree branches, whittled down to the right
-diameter.
-This might make repairs easier, in case a strut bends or breaks.
All houses will have some spare parts on board, and part of
the Global Dwelling Service we provide will be in-field repair and/or
swapping, up to and including the whole house, if some catastrophe
happens like a tree falling on it.
> maker (or 7 of them), a hub-maker (or 7 of them), an aerogel-panel
-Is aerogel producible on site? Much like foam, it might be simpler to
-ship the materials to the site, and "foam" it in.
No, aerogel is tricky, and requires high-pressure (like,
1000+ psi) facilities. Best to leave that to the professionals.
-Since you're talking about making the struts on site, the panels may
-not be a "standard" size. Being able to "fill in" between the struts
-might be a useful feature.
Actually, I'm *not* talking about making struts on site.
They'd be made at a factory, someplace, according to the precise
lengths we specify. They'd be milled/tapped/threaded as needed, and
ideally, preassembled at one of our factories, someplace. Then
delivered, complete (and by helicopter or airship),
to a location or GPS coordinate that the buyer specifies.
If you go down the road of trying to cut pieces on-site, and
assemble them on-site, and fill in gaps on-site, then you're exactly
where we are, now. That's not where I'd like to be.
Perhaps the best way to frame this concept is to think about
automobiles and airplanes. When you buy a car, do you have the
Sheet-metal Workers Local #342 come to your driveway and start
pounding out body panels? Do you have the Upholsterers Union #128 set
up over by the mailbox, sewing your seats out of fabric and foam? Do
you have Almagamated Rubber Products, Inc., set up a furnace by the
rose bushes, vulcanizing rubber and casting tires for your new
car-to-be?
No. You look through a catalog, you go on the web, you go to
a lot, and you pick out a model that you like. You then get in and
drive it away, or have it delivered to you after they order it from
the factory with the options you specified.
The same thing happens at Boeing or Airbus. Someone orders a
747-sized plane, and it's manufactured, to incredibly tight
specifications, and delivered to the customer. There's no cutting of
materials to special-fit something at the delivery site. They don't
fill in gaps with tarpaper, spackle, or grout. You order the product,
they make the product, they deliver the product.
This is precisely what I want to do with autonomous houses.
> maker (or 7 of them), and octet-truss floor makers (or 7 of them).
> A 4-frequency geodesic sphere will have the following
> component parts (provided my calculations are correct! :-) ):
> Hub part counts are based on my hub design at
> http://reality.sculptors.com/~salsbury/House/
-A question -- why a 4 frequency? Here's why I ask. Most of the world
-is familiar with soccer balls -- truncated icosahedra. This, if
-triangulated, *is* a 3F dome. Going with a familiar geometry might
-assist people in actually erecting these home shells. It also
-requires fewer parts, though the final structures cannot be quite as
-large without becoming unwieldy.
I actually wanted panels that would be small enough to lift
and handle easily, so I originally guestimated at something about 1m
on a side. It turns out that we'd have to get into the 6-8Freq range
to do that with a 50ft/16m sphere. The triangles in my 35' dome are
about 6.5' on edge. At my friend's 39' dome, they're about 8'. We're
both in 3F icosas. (Cathedralite, for those of you into the
designers... :-) )
Barring getting the panel edges that small (1m), I weighed the
part counts for 3, 4, and 5F domes, the edge lengths, and the
strengths. (Domes get stronger the more elements you have to disperse
stresses, so a 4 is stronger than a 3, a 5 stronger than 4, etc.) I
originally wanted a 5Freq, because they look cool. But then we've got
500 panels, rather than 320. It could get even more expensive really
quickly.
4F also divides cleanly at the equator. (All even-frequency
domes do. Whereas my 3F dome is really a 4/9ths sphere, resting atop
a riser wall. The autonomous designs are going to be spherical or
ellipsoid, so they'll have good structural strength, but if you were
going to build a half-dome, you'd definitely have some simpler math
just doing a bisected even-frequency sphere.
> Remember also that those numbers are per-year, and that
> we're
> looking at 40-year sustained order loads, just to deal with today's
> homeless issues.
Another question. Most homeless people are not in a position to
purchase
a home kit, despite our good intentions. How will these be funded?
As I said in a post last night, there are different classes
of products to meet different needs. Rich yuppies and techies and
geeks and scientists and space-heads might want their own autonomous,
self-contained spaceship house to go anywhere on earth, and would
probably happily afford the helicopter/airship costs to move it every
6 months, but the homeless would just like a roof overhead, some
warmth and security, and a chance to live a normal life. So you have
different levels of complexity (and cost), and use the financing of
the upper-tier products to help with the deployment of the lower-cost
units.
Another thing to remember is that mass-production reduces
price drastically. I don't even want to THINK about what a prototype
is going to cost me, but if we're making millions per year, then the
total cost of these should be about the price of other mass-produced
goods in that mass/production-amount range: namely, cars and other
vehicles.
I suspect that, once produced in quantity, these should be able to be
priced (similar to cars) in the $25,000-$50,000 range, putting them
within reach of even new college grads who are starting out in
entry-level positions. In fact, you may well see parents given
baseline houses to kids as graduation presents, rather than cars. If
you factor financing schemes into it, people could still take out a
loan like for a car, and pay it back over 3-7 years, rather than the
30-40 of many mortgages today.
Also, don't forget that an autonomous house means that you
don't have to worry about certain other things, so chop away your
power bill, and your water bill, and half of your food bill (if
you've got your own garden, which these will), along with the rent or
mortgage you're paying now. You'll find about 40-60% of your expenses
are now in your pocket, and you can use those to pay down the house
costs in the very short term.
If you already own a house, you sell it and pocket somewhere
between $150,000-$750,000, depending on what you live in now, and
where. (In the SF Bay area, housing rates are sky-high. Sunnyvale,
boasting the highest average house costs now sells relatively
nondescript small suburban homes for something like $325,000, and a
friend in SF just found out that his condo that cost $330,000 about
20 months ago is now worth about $525,000.
So you sell the high-cost house, buy a $25-50K autonomous
house, and stick the rest in the bank. Or pay off all your debts, put
the kids through college, invest a bunch in stocks and bonds, and go
on a 3-month vacation. See, a quarter or
half million dollars is a LOT of money. People just aren't used to
the idea of having it to spend, because they usually sell a house to
trade up to something more expensive. Thus, they perpetuate their
debt, and continue having to work to support their bills and money
owed to the bank.
This model has the potential to radically alter the playing
field, but allowing a large number of people to get OUT of debt, to
invest in their own futures, to choose whether or not they WANT to
work, not to HAVE to work.
It gives people the ability to go to college, get out and
work for a few years, and retire, if they so desire, at the age of 30
or 35. That then leaves them with DECADES to explore and grow
personally. What will that do for society? What sorts of new art,
music, writing, software, hardware, and other artifacts will we be
able to come up with, when we aren't all scraping around for a buck
to pay the rent with?
The autonomous house is one stepping stone in a larger
canvas of Reality Sculpting. It is an enabling technology, designed
to help people get out of the trap of the modern work/pay-bills/
consume world.
Roll these ideas around in your head for a bit. I'd love to
hear what you all think of them.
-I wonder if an "advertising" model, something like Juno and NetZero,
-would allow for genuinely free houses?
Ick. I hate web-advertising. And it's not genuinely free, as they're
eating away at your concentration with lots of stupid little blinking
things trying to get you to purchase their brand of perfume or
underwear. Advertising (to me) seems like the epitome of everything
that's going wrong with our consumer society. A whole bunch of people
who don't even notice that product-peddlers are forcing unbidden
images down your eye sockets and directly into the tender tissues of
your brain.
People keep worrying about protecting children from porn on
the Net and TV and Movies... I think they should be MUCH more
worried about the unmonitored ads that no one even seems to notice
pelting them from all directions. From every web page, from email,
from TV and radio and billboards and newspapers and magazines, etc.
I, personally find advertising to be MUCH more offensive than
pornography. :-)
If you want to get a better feel for this, or at least
understand my viewpoint a bit better, read this:
http://reality.sculptors.com/~salsbury/Articles/moore.txt
It's a seemingly fictional story about how Television
violates people daily without their realizing it. Pretty creepy,
mainly because it hits so close to home. WARNING: reading this story
may very well put you off of watching TV. Several of my friends have
quit shortly after reading it. :-)
If you're tired of unbidden ads on your web browser, get the
Junkbuster: http://www.junkbuster.com/
-I'd like to think a group like Habitat could make these available, but
-they've proven themselves to be anti-dome.
-
- -- Chuck Knight
Yeah, I remember the thread about that. The main problem I
have with Habitat is that they just do things in the same sort of
way. They aren't really helping to make more affordable housing, per
se, they're just using donations to defray the cost and make it more
affordable for one family.
Still, they are doing good work. And not everyone should (or
wants to!) live in a dome. Always something to keep in mind. Even if
we're trying to design a universally useful solution, it's not EVER going to
be adopted universally.
Gawd, but this has been an incredibly long post! If you made
it all the way through, congratulations! :-)
Pat