Wikiversity Project

I am working on a microbusiness plan and model at Cargo Imports as part of the Lunar Boom Town study project. The study subject is a mass produced robotic cargo carrier specialized for one way payload to the moon. Payload is maximized by maximizing the salvage value of the Lunar Insertion Stage (crash lander) and the Cargo Soft Lander by constructing them of recyclable elements and components in demand in lunar free markets. I may include robotic warehouse at spaceport at both ends of the cargo leg. I am going to storyboard the whole process by using youtube clips and produce one or two stills and clip segments myself. I am sort of doing a virtual systems engineering project for a robotic cargo cargo. A virtual robot or vapourware. 8)

I am also going to try to cast and machine my own parts for a Estes style model of the virtual robotic carrier. I expect to make a few nickels by returning whole al cans to store while melting down crushed ones for aluminum. I will do some sample economic calculations using estimated electrical consumption and cost of manufacturing green sand casting box, stainless steel melting pot, and pattern.

I suppose I could attempt to sell the model on EBay after test flight for materials analysis or failure analysis.

It would be slick if anybody is interested if some robotics got added into the budding venture plans. Never can tell. We might come up with a viable micro cottage manufacturing variant applicabe to garage hobby or startup here on Earth.

It would be nice also if some of you guys did some of your common efforts at a robotics department, project, course, or task at Wikiversity to add to the free engineering commons design and manufacturing specifications available. We are trying to learn what ground rules and web techniques work for various R&D types of efforts. Wikiversity would benefit immensely if you share with us what you need to collaborate effectively online in pickup teams. We are starting to attract some serious academic and professional scouts so some of you might find access to certain types of pickup expertise or casual chit chat focused on the specific design task you face useful.

Just imagine an open/free specification robotic manufacturing line controlled by a network of "One Laptop Per Child" computers carving doodads for sale to wealthy knick knack collectors on EBay.

Search on Robotics on Wikiversity.

Elasticity may be useful to anyone pushing materials performance envelope.

Online learning and reference resources

Wikibooks (A Wikimedia Foundation, http:\\www.wikimedia.org, sponsored project) augments Wikipedia.org with FDL'ed online textbook and how to resources. Active Wikimedia participants voted 69% (approx 200 of a little under 300 votes) to establish and begin developing Wikiversity, a free online university open and free to all responsible participants.

An appropriate coursebook has been drafted and an initial Wikiversity:School of Engineering:Electrical Fundamentals course initiated that some here might find of interest. We need course participants, developers, and instructors interested in theory, design, prototyping and implementation. I am hopeful that some U.S. engineers reviewing for their engineering boards will show up to help us with some instruction, tutorials and problems. I am also hopeful that some of our robots.net enthusiasts will find it of obvious use to the community and well worth participating with its initial development and subsequent maintenance while enhancing personal skills and projects.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity:School of Engineering:360_Fundamentals_of_Electrical_Engineering

Some of us might find some of the other courses useful and even wish to initiate some other courses applicable to robotics to create online learning resources helpful in augmenting skill levels within open engineering commmunities and team projects.

I invite and encourage anyone interested in helping by actively participating in enhancing existing personal skillsets to come by occasionally and collaborate on self selected tasks/tweaks/study with others while leaving behind an ever improving legacy of online learning materials for newcomers to robotics and the internet.

Wikipedia was not built in a day. It took hundreds and then thousands of dedicated participants as well as hundreds of thousands if not millions of casual edits from dropin internet users a few years to create a free online encyclopedia plus capable of convincing hundreds that it is possible to create a free online Wikiversity. Wikipedia is now among the top 50 web sites receiving traffic online according to Alexa.

I am proud of the small part I played in helping Wikipedia succeed and I intend to pursue graduate level studies at Wikiversity while considering some entrepreneurial opportunities and reviewing engineering fundamentals in preparation for U.S. Board of Engineering Examiners EIT and PE exams. In a decade, I will be able to say I was there and helped create a free educational resource that is helping people worldwide enhance their personal skills, economies and cultures in support of the civilized world's declared war on terrorism. This will satisfy my self declared intention to respond to President Bush's call to action in support of the global war on terrorism.

... and maybe I will finally get some basic robotic toys and/or prototype components implemented in my home work area.

If anyone has any questions or suggestions for us at Wikiversity they can drop a message for me on my talk page at Lazyquaser (rex, robots.net journeyer; mirwin, advogato.org journeyer) or leave a comment or question at one of the pages linked to from there.

Future portal may be www.wikiversity.org

Raw materials, Parts, and Tools

Been strolling for excercise along local highway. Picking up litter, nickels (OR refund Cans, uncrushed), metals (lead weights, crushed aluminum cans), and larger salvage.

Recently found a lawn mower which I am tearing down and perhaps rebuilding for educational purposes. Found a truck drive shaft .... when I get access to a decent lathe might be able to make something of it ... or perhaps slice it in cross sections for wheels???

Started selling stuff at a local flea market. Getting back into rocks in a variety of ways. Have a local supplier for slices of low grade gemstone which I hope to use to create artwork or christmas decorations which people will buy. To fill table out I have been buying and reselling stuff as well as selling salvage computer software, cables, open source apps, and my own software production.

Gotta go, later fellow robotics lovers.

I am back I now have a design goal. Nasa has posted a 250K prize for essentially a robotic way station capable of cracking 10kg of O2 out of lunar regolith and having it handy for wayward lunar suit occupants or explorers.

Centennial Challenge Lunox

I will be at least prototyping a robot to accomplish prior to beginning the engineering necessary to achieve weight, power, and time constraints on the winning system. Even if I do not win (and I must consider myself a dark horse) I will learn a lot that will be of great use to production lunox operators and lunar colonists resulting from huge success with the CRV.

I will establish a formal project here and start posting Process and Instrumentation Diagrams and protographs of the conceptual prototypes as I get them layed out in the carport or down on paper. This is going to be a lot of fun!

Incidentally, I am grateful that this site has been developed by Steven Rainwater, et. al. and all of you readers while I have been goofing off elsewhere on the internet. This site is going to be incredibly useful as I start serious prototyping and soldering necessary to integrate the off-the-shelf and custom components of my Lunox Waystation Wanderor ... LW^2? ... I will need to work on a good acronym. Even if I do not win the prize, I might be able to sell some solid engineering to somebody contracting to NASA in a decade or two?

Anyway I am off to read the recentlog, scan the local site, go gambling with my Dad for Father's day and finish my post at Advogato (which now has a pointer to here). Later

Just checking in, have not done much with robotic design yet. Perhaps the articles or diaries here will provide some inspiration.

I had some stray thoughts crystallize while watching reports regarding this war on terrorism that has gotten started in Afghanistan as a result of the mass murder of thousands in the WTC.

Outline Draft Proposal for an education and monitoring station that could help pre-empt terrorism in remote areas.

http://www.advogato.com/person/mirwin/diary.html?start=55

I may have messed up by proposing too specific an energy system because the systems field requirements could be refined by U.S. military experts. It now occurrs to me that such a system could easily be flown or driven into remote areas with knowledgeable (able to read and apply American English written instructions) peace corp volunteers via some of the remotely piloted vehicles that have been reported in articles here as in use or under development and that some of the local robotics experts might be able to further enhance these systems for specific missions.

For example: An alcohol or methane based internal combusion engine might be available by converting the presumably gasoline or jp engine of one of the U.S. military's survelliance aircraft. If a portable computer and satellite dish could be smuggled or driven in then this power plant could serve local elements of civilization well. Likewise the solar cells on the wings of any solar powered surveillance robot that came down (either intentionally crashes or shot down). There are myriad possibilities and since the U.S. military has been training for decades for information warfare and the CIA and NSA engaged in these double and triple think operations routinely in the cold war I am certain that as Tom Ridge's Home Defense Office gets established and really starts coordinating that we will see some awesomely creative and synergistic solutions begin to emerge.

For example: I noticed in the news that the nation's water and waste water treatment plants have requested $5Billion to enhance security on their plants. Can you imagine how many of the systems such as I have proposed could be put into place in U.S. rural and urban communities to help protect our water supplies while providing our teenagers the communications and processing systems they so desperately need to safely self educate themselves in high tech systems in preparation for participation in a high tech job market and war on terrorism? Let's say each system as fielded in remote global areas cost ten to twenty thousand apiece. Then dividing 20K into 2B we get one hundred thousand standalone remote monitoring and educational systems in rural remote USA tied into U.S. military satellites or domestic internet providers. Obviously several thousand of the 20K must be budgeted for electricity, feul and internet access. This will not make arms manufacturers happy but we can alway buy COT (commercial off the shelf) equipment if the margins are insufficient for bloated defense industries to manage effectively in pursuit of an economic profit over and above a reasonable rate of return on investment. Using COTS in more traditional urban environnments we should be able to keep the unit price well under 10K .... giving us over 300K systems in low rent districts and urban ghettos (nobody really wants to live next to a sewage treatment plant so these tend to be in low rent districts or ghettos with high rent if it can be arranged by the landlords).

Anyway, I would be interested in any thoughts on how to improve the proposal but to avoid wasting any time in implementation if it has any merit I have already cc'd it to Tom Ridge so his highly effective, if underpaid by personally demanding standards, U.S.G. professionals can slice and dice it for possible tasks worthy of integration into existing U.S.G. civil defense and anti-terrorism efforts already on the drawing boards and actively being fielded.

My email access is a bit erratic so if you wish to send your thoughts by U.S. postal service to:

Michael R. Irwin 876 N. Knott Coquille, OR 97423

Email me at my occasionally checked email drop: lazyquasar@yahoo.com

or merely record them in your journal here and cc them to Tom Ridge, Home Defense Coordinator care of President Bush, The White House, Washington D.C.

as you deem most appropriate, I would sincerely appreciate your participation in our war on terrorism and other anti civilization influences world wide as well as here at home in the U.S.

Sincerely Michael R. Irwin Apprentice as of Oct 2001, robots.net

P.S. Can you picture 2,000 esm (or better designed robots ... I am aware that I am way behind in my robot designs if I wish to see them fielded .... perhaps I could license the name and participate somehow with a robotic design team that chooses to use it) with a payload as described above creeping over the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan while sending continuous telemetry to each other and U.S. military forces? I wonder what the casualty ratio of terrorist attackers vs. esm school stations would be? After establishing a baseline we could probably tell when the local U.S. and NATO military forces were getting overtasked because obviously response to a robot in distress will be amongst the lowest priority tasking in the theator if active military ops or attacks upon villages are suspected to be immanent. You got to figure it would tie up and slow down a lot of terrorist forces if they first have to be certain that U.S. and NATO forces are tied up elsewhere before they attack a cheap robot or face attack helicopters, snipers, high altitude bombing or whatever else the civilized world's manufacturing base chooses to profitably expend upon them in retaliation for attacking mobile schools and economic infrastructure on the way to serve our brethren within Afghanistan or other previously economically and informationally disadvantaged regions.

Started to get some nibbles from the local high school industrial arts program and the local college instructors that are somehow involved with local economic development regarding my ideas for some local prototyping of transparent entrepreneurialism and engineering combined with some skills seminars and open access to the publicly owned machine tools in the local schools. Pretty traditional standoff actually, before the instructors and schools make any committments about availibility of machine tools they want a large student list and guarantees of benefits they can show school boards. Typical professional cover your ass behavior ..... unfortunately the local unemployed millwrights and machinists are very familiar with this type of behavior from the plants they used to work at which are now shutdown and out of business. They are reluctant to invest their precious time until someone proves they have gotten past the monkey motion phases in which most of these efforts get bogged down in. Further there seem to be large uncertainties in insurance issues and legalities and qualified security monitoring etc. etc.

I shall have to reconsider this a bit. It may be better to work strictly on the private side and lobby the local school board to reduce taxes by shutting down all ineffective activities which are better taught elsewhere or on the job. Perhaps high school should consist of a half day of reading, writing and arithmetic with work study activities in the afternoon where the students can learn real business and industry skills while putting some money away for either college or their initial toolkits.

On a more positive note ..... a friend of mine is setting up an industrial grade wood shop so he can get into cabinet building. I salvaged an old PC power supply from a local civil defense exercise (somebody planted it as a simulated explosive package in a garbage can at the local high school to see how long it would take chaotic but alert defensive citizens to spot it and have it removed) that has some of the capacitors I need to build him a capacitor network for a wood working tool he is refurbishing. Now all I have to do is find an electrical fundamentals book or see if I can derive the proper kirchoff laws from one of the other electronics and engineering handbooks I have lying around. I got rid of many of them on last summers book bombing raids into the heart of local tree age country so I may have to figure out how to use the local shuttle system to go to SWOCC (South Western Oregon Community College) library to look up the proper design methods.

Perhaps I should use mostly wood in my initial ESM prototypes. It is certainly the most prevalent local resource although I have found some supplies of steel in locally polluted ditches and creeks. Myrtlewood nuts would appear to make decent ball bearings for joints that experience only low dynamic or quasi static loads. There are some interesting examples of ball bearing use scattered around various local parks where volunteers have used scrap parts to assemble high quality teeter totters for the kiddies and their accompanying adults. Careful study of how the wobbling binds various types of installations might help me avoid initial problems with pivot joints.

Cool looking articles here on hydraulics and other stuff. I am way behind on my reading. I may take a few days off soon from civil defense preparations and spend them reading the articles that are posted here. I think they will provide a pretty good overview of the state of the art of robotics application as well as some very innovative ideas and technology approaches to robot specific design issues.

Hi All,

I have been a bit busy and have not made any overt progress on my esm line of pack robots. I am very impressed with the level of information that steve and the rest of you guys manage to track down and post. I sure hope that the site owners are considering ways to make money off of this site, so that this valuable online learning experience can be improved and remain available online indefinately. Further, as it continues growing we will need better knowledge base engines and perhaps even some high end engineering analysis tools to continue growing our mind share in which ever market segment the site owners decide to optimize the site for. All this takes money or at least resources and resources must provide a return somehow to all stakeholders or friction develops to the detriment of the robotic organism being grown. No good to have brains if you have insufficient muscle or stored energy reserves to get them where they need to be to accomplish self selected or societally pre coordinated goals. So I think anyway.

I have been learning a lot about mechanics and logistics that will eventually be of use in designing cost effective and useful robots but I fear that I have a ways to go. Fortunately it seems we have many fellow travelors who like the idea of using smart structures to increase humanities potential to implement a true civilization in near space soon.

I take heart from the fact that anything that can be prototyped via manual labor and effective organization can be programmed and automated for routine implementation by creative software developers and engineering teams. It is certainly going to be exciting working in and around the robotics fields of all types for the next few decades.

The advances coming out of the military applications that we are starting to see are going to be very interesting to apply to enhancing civilian productivity as soon as sufficiently trained and responsible citizenry are available to be entrusted with these genies ..... so I think anyway.

I am nearing my allocated time limit for this activity so I shall close by appending the replies I made to a couple of thought provoking articles and questions that were also posted here:

UAVs in the War Against Terrorists

My immediate thought on finding caves was rather star trekian and involved lots of data processing and comparison of thermal sensing data and patterns.

If a more immediate solution is required I would think about designing a robot to crawl in with a seismometer and a satellite transmitter link. An F-15, F16, or F-14 could detonate a rocket at a laser designated site when enough of the robot squads were in place to take readings. Then the siezmotransports crawl on to the next location and wait for the next flyby or buzz bomb to impact.

Clearly there would be substantial attrition of these throwaway robots. Perhaps they could be equipped with some primitive arms operated via teleoperations (we would not want a kid to trigger an attack upon themselves) or commands so that if discovered by hostile terrorist forces they could take pot shots back and keep the terrorists pinned down for a while before attempting a kamikaze run on the nearest terrorist.

It is worth noting that such robots would have a lot of useful components so the design should verifiably destroy most of the most militarily valuable components or the terrorsts would soon be sending these back to civilization's cities, outposts, neighborhoods, and/or parks.

It is also worth noting that judicious stage acting would allow delivery of useful materials and wealth to double agents or freedom fighters in the area under guise of preparation for an overt U.S. military attack. While terrorist leaders waste their resources watching for paratroopers local freedom fighters might be eroding their support base until an almost bloodless coup or a final battle in defense of the free villages computer centers and schools solved the problem of thugs in charge.

Clearly once the thug governments are gone tactics will have to change so we are not arming barbarians with advanced technology allowing them to be more of a nuiscance than would otherwise be the case.

While an intelligent barbarian can probably duplicate anything in the field that civilization's advanced manufacturing processes can put out, it takes a lot of time and effort compared to walking into a military command post and requesting a security sweep of the neighborhood via robotic security forces because a barbarian was spotted crossing the SOSUS borders of the local parks.

UC Davis Develops Highway Robots

I saw a demo in the parking lot of the local Dairy Queen (actually D.Q. out of business locally, it is a local restaurant now) of a small manual line painter that used spay cans to paint the parking lot lines. It was a tiny unit and was powered by a relaxed skilled operator taking their time. It looked like it might take all day to paint the lot (4 hours?) as customers moved in and out but it was being done by a student and a coach or perhaps a contractor and a local city official (my vision is a bit fractal sometimes and closer I look the more overlapping fractal patterns and possibilities seem to emerge .... kind of an uncertainty principle I guess .... freedom loving citizens seem hate to being pinned down or well understood by the local busybodies ..... keeps life interesting I suppose .....)

If a remote controlled tractor and set of utilities trailors were developed it might be possible to automate or comfortably oversee many of the tasks that currently take entire work crews.

Also of interest is the fact that the parking lot was not closed. Apparently there was a high level of confidence that local citizens would avoid the wet lines if possible and that if they got smudged by accident or inattentiveness that this could easily be fixed or was not a problem. I did not look around to see if there were caution signs or other signals out to attract motorist attention prior to getting into the parking lot which was under construction. Perhaps the work crew and bright new pavement and yellow lines were enough for this relaxed yet efficacious private project approach. How the owner overcame fear of liability for others studidity to allow this project on their business grounds I have no idea. Perhaps they carry business liability insurance with an insurance firm they are comfortable will be their obligations ..... how they found such a firm in the U.S. rather staggers my limited imagination. Still, I was always satisfied with Farmer's Truck Insurance Exchange in Corvallis. When one office treated me badly in my perception I moved on to another agent and his service has been exemplary. An employee had an accident in a company vehicle one time and I never heard anything more about it after I referred the child driver's (the victim, my employee ... think .... and I were in agreement that even though she might have been traveling with the prevailing speed of the traffic a bit faster than posted limit, visibility was good and he definately pulled out in front of her) mother to my agent I never heard anything more about it. This despite the fact that the parent stated this was her only transportation to work and support her family and she needed it fixed. I never followed up and made sure she was actually taken care of by Farmer's. I assumed that if she had problems she would call me back as she was aware that it was a company vehicle and that we acknowledged that we were contributory to the accident occuring even if the basic rule in Oregon says the driver must be in control and able to stop their vehicle at all times prior to impacting other motorists or property. Maybe the next time I talk to Todd I will find out if the name and phone number is in the accident report he filed. Way late to fix if my insurance agency is as bad as some I have seen but it would correct a dangerously inaccurate world view of mine regarding Farmer's Insurance Exchange if the single major accident I have ever been involved in resulted in the victim getting shafted like most of the insurance scams/incidents I have witnessed as a curious observer.

Anyway, back to the subject. Such a robotics tool sized appropriately might help keep taxes down here in Oregon by volunteers or training groups to paint roads as per detailed plans using recycled ground glass mixed in white paint by the county on demand or from reasonable storage. Citizens would want to know what high paid county workers do all day if citizen volunteers are out doing much of the work. It would be important to have open houses and an open door policy in conjunction with a friendly well connected neighborly work force such that local citizens, taxpayers, and commercial interests have a high degree of certainly that the community is receiving value added back commiserate with the effort of volunteers put in. There are a lot of organizations around who seem to exist to waste volunteers time and resources to little true effect and as a result Americans have gotten a bit shy of late about participating in volunteer and even professionally paid team efforts.

Another application incredibly useful in Oregon would be blackberry snipping and gourse trimming. In the past and possibly even now the State of Oregon and County Highway departments have expended huge summs of money spraying carcinogens and toxic chemicals on blackberries and gourse in a futile attempt to keep them back away from the roadbeds. This potentially results in poisened tourists and locals (where were your kids really picking those blackberries you put in their cream and berry ice cream or tarts?) as well as polluted ground water and wild life. I wonder if any of that stuff actually affected genetics of surviving species ..... I recommend against Stephen King's environmentally slanted stuff if you have an overactive imagination ....... one book of his I read probably reduced my hiking and outsdooring by 50% for a couple of years after I read it. Have to wonder though if he has some good points considering the sheer stupidly with which U.S. citizens are willing to cheerfully take Dow's word for stuff and then refuse to read the fine print and refuse to fund independent studies or revisit usage regulations more than twice a century.

I wonder if pharmaceutical company owners also own stock in big chemical companies? First we poisen them at a large profit by capturing American Farmers and using USDA to destroy crops protected by insects prior to them reaching market and then we make lots of money selling ineffective drugs that pretend to fix the chemically induced problems while creating side effects sufficient to encourage further drug use. Finally we charge thousands of dollars a day for the privelege of being warehoused in a hospital or retirement home until their money runs out and then we use the laws we purchased to require relatives to pay thousands for unnecessary and unnatural burial services which incidentally we can use to create future super fund sites.

I shall have to check further into this line of thought .... could be millions, thousands even ..... iff the racket were run properly. The thing I got to figure first though is do I want in on the action or should I make a fortune making noise and creating apparent motion that exacerbates the problems that I make a fortune talking about? After all, a few billion is not enough, I might need a few billion more if someone purchases a yaught a few feet larger than my own or lines it with platinum or titanium fixtures to impress the high society hookers and whores with whom they and I wish to associate.

Maybe while I think about this I will be more careful about washing my hands after handling the roadside cans I have been picking up to help finance the "Getting Ready" effort. Might be fun sometime to audit the accounts of the professionals currently spending billions to prepare the war machine that was supposed to be ready at a moment's notice at a price of past trillions and starving freezing amcits in the streets and see what creative methods (of reaching out to love fellow freedom loving peoples who wish to join the Terran Federation while waiting for the United Planets to get their act together) they are using in their black programs.

I trust that fair play and continuous improvement of processes and standards are the order of the day so when we Americans choose to allow them to shine publicly, they are proud of their performance. Confident that they did their best working within the initial conditions they were given and loving various lover's suggestions if they could measure or even suspect the anticipated gains sufficiently to devise safe ways to try it and find out, retaining options where possible to back up and try again.

Anyway. Cool robot ideas. We should consider adding telemetry and mainframe support so that online tasking and status databases are kept up to date and periodic hardcopy dumps are made either incrementally or in their entirety for military use by home defense forces. Perhaps the slightly obsolete material could be given away to the public for training exercises or recycled effectively in some other way ..... redline QCs could be performed by art and drafting classes in the field to verify that the teams actually accomplished the work they thought they did at the location they reported. This would also provided a closed loop system end to end check. If a third verification method could be devised then a high level of certaintly would start to exist that the white safety lines on our highways that augment night driving for older feeble eyes in the rain locally are actually in place and ready to assist winter drivers and tourists. Not to mention avoiding unnecessary off road accidents in the event of an emergency mass evacuation of a terrorist targetted town.

A possibly profitable way to begin implementing this might be to have teams of interested citizens use the manual tools to mark off start and stop points for line tasking for the highway professionals painting lines with the heavy duty equipment. As they get better they could start knocking off the small lines and the details painted on the road (such as arrows, stops, etc.) so that the county crews would not have to start and stop all the time when painting the highway lines between towns. Also line maintenance could almost be done fractally or chaotically by citizens out for long duration hikes if they used proper flagging techniques and used walkies talkies to tell each other to get out of the road because impatient motorists and/or incompetent CDL drivers had blown by the flag points at high speed. A cell phone could also drop a quarter or two on reporting license numbers and status of offending vehicles to the DMV. Vehicles with large patterns of reckless behavior might warrant a visit by the police of appropriate levels to remind the owners and operators that an audit trail of sorts is beginning to materialize and point out that civil courts do not require absolute certainly to levy large economic penalties if a jury becomes convinced that criminal negligence and willful stupidity were involved even if it could not be proven to the satisfaction of a judge and/or jury adhering to the higher standard of beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Hi All,

I also was shocked by the trade tower bombing. I thought our training program was far enough along that we had sufficient manpower to protect ourselves. I also thought that the Moslems had a civilization and that only a tiny fringe was insane or erratic enough to violate their own commandments against killing. Obviously I was incorrect.

Resources

I have made substantial progress on the resources issue here locally. A local group of businessmen is working with me to setup some cottage manufacturing capabilities. We have an approximately 20?30X100?200 sqare feet plus a local buddyy of mine has been colllecting and refurbishing heavy duty work working machine tools.

I have started getting the carport sorted out into a sewing machine area in one end along with my mom's automated sewing machine I should be able to put some high quality emblem patches on the internet marketplace soon.

I have also found several useful ocmponent attached to spent water bottles and have begun purchasing these consumables so that recycling adds to my compopnent's bin.

Kiryu on working Al Exellent information regarding aluminum construction, plus or minus one entry. JB weld for aluminun.

I am now considering two different concepts from the preliminary previously discussed (sorry I think it is not posted yet, I will try to rekey the information I lost and get it into the project page.

Basically the initial concept was looking at a robust microrover with wireless link to the interact and a remote supercomputer if I can get beawolf working on our local net. Speaking of which, I will be traveling for a couple of weeks so entries here will be sporadic. At least when I get back to homebase my brother will have our cisco router and subnet up and running, then I start doing conceptual work in 3DSMax models so I can animate the expected motions of mechanical components.

The two new easier prototypes I am considering to get started effectively consist of:

Collecting Human Factors and Interest Information

A wagon and some talking toys for my neice and nephew. They are approximatley 2nd graders and the research requirements for this prototype assembly will be to determine the range of capabilities on board to retain the child's interest. By going with an unpowered protoype and requiring the child the pull the wagon along if he/she want to we eliminate the potential risk of the child feeling trapped or spied upon by their esm (star mule extraordinary) companion. The final unit must incorporate the features demaned to maintain the child's interest. We should also leave the tow bar/handle/leash function so that if the self motivation energy is running low the esm with its load may be pulled by its human owner or a truck as appropriate to the unit's size and function.

I think that much of this information should be very similar for similar robuts. Since my niece and nephew are in Texas and I am usually in Idaho or Oregon I will probably look around online to see if I can find information that is applicable without doing all my own research.

Developing Some Personnel Skills and Understanding of the ESM Line Functional and Manufacturing Requirements.

Use some tin snips and steel edges and hinges to create tiny robot parts out of recycled aluminums cans and plastic. The unit should be big enough to use an onboard electronics package in common with the entire mid section of the final line. (child buddy to light industrial or packpack). This should allow me to build a unit large enough to use cots (commercial off the shelf) for the electronics components.

sashi ono Sound like a good cheap prospect for some electronics for my prototypes. Might be a bit expensive in the long run for the lighter units in the toy/domestic market.

kerap Hi kerap, I hope things are going well for you. I had a successful meeting with my sponsor and some of his associates (I have been sponsored to study open paradigms as applicable to long term commercialization potential by my brother.) He has no personal interest in robotics at this time but he agreed that participation here might be a way to get in on a leading technology edge if robotics go small and cheaply mass produced soon. If you would like to discuss your resource problems further in private feel free to contact me at mri_icboise@surfbest.net or lazyquasar@yahoo.com I cannot guarantee a response at this time since I do not seem to be recieving any messages at these two addresses other than cc material self addressed for recordkeeping and filing processes. If you put a paragraph or two in your diary here ocassionally I shall eventually catch up with it. I am sorry but if I do not hear from you within a few weeks then I feel the most appropriate thing for me to do is decertify you. I wish you luck in future endeavers, perhaps we shall cross paths again. I hope so, we really need some small cheap robots and low end low cost prototyping by interested people seems to be the best way for the field to advance in ways useful to small open entrepreneurs.

Further information on these concepts is available at:

lazyquasar@yahoo.com open space entrepreneurialism

advogato.com Online community for Open/Free developers.

gnome.org This open source software NPO has a working model set up showing how a large and growing online community sharing common interests can organize and government themselves for the benefit of larger projects.