Post-Scarcity Engineering. TL;DR: Robots & Ranches. TL: working towards self-sustaining homesteads w/ Permaculture, Robotics, & AI; driven by micro-factories.
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Today was the maiden voyage of our autonomous rover prototype.
Our engineering interns teleoperated it while we followed behind with hazard lights on, handling safety and traffic control. I monitored the truck cameras and called out approaching vehicles as they came in.
A lot of work led to this moment, and a lot more is ahead.
This is only the beginning.
SEE?!
THE CYBERTRUCK IS AMAZING IN AN AGRICULTURAL SETTING!
PLEASE DO NOT CANCEL THE CYBERTRUCK, @ELONMUSK!
Lightning protection update: the copper is picked up! 🤠
Ground rods and #2 solid copper are loaded and headed to the ranch to ground three of our five 40' comms towers.
Why: a 40' steel tower is the tallest thing around, and Texas storms find it. Grounding each tower leg gives a strike a short, low-resistance path into the earth, instead of through our hardware payload that we’ve designed, radios, network gear, and everything wired to them. It follows the tower maker's guidance and standard electrical-code practice.
How: each leg gets its own run. A lead of #2 solid copper clamps to the leg, crosses the pad, and drops into its own trench to a 10' copper-bonded ground rod.
Our rock is too hard to drive rods straight down, so we're laying them flat in trenches instead and packing them in conductive backfill. That lowers the soil's resistance around each rod, so a strike spreads into the ground faster.
Why a crow's foot: with three legs, you'd normally run each one straight out, spread wide around the tower. Several of our towers sit in corners, so instead we fan the three runs out 45° apart, about a quarter-circle, aimed away from the corner. The rods still don't crowd the same patch of soil, and a strike gets three paths into the ground instead of one.
The 15' lead length and the copper spec came from guidance from our electrical supplier and project team. Thanks again to @ZacharySisson3 for the early design work and fully shepherding this phase of the work — this was entirely his project, including ongoing discussion with our vendors.
Phase 2, maybe: lightning rods up top. What we're doing now is phase 1, grounding. It gives a strike somewhere safe to go once it hits the tower. Lightning rods (air terminals) on top would be a separate add-on: rods mounted above the antennas to intercept the strike, connected by down conductors to the grounding we're putting in now.
We're not adding them yet. Grounding is the baseline that the tower maker's guidance calls for, and it's what we see on most towers like ours, so we're starting there. We're still weighing whether rods up top are worth it down the road.
The good news is that the ground system comes first either way. If we add rods later, they bond into the same crow's foot, so nothing we're burying gets wasted. The likely changes: a heavy down conductor per tower, bonded to the ground system; possibly more ground rods or longer runs if a single tower needs a lower resistance; and bonding the antennas and coax at the base so everything stays at the same potential.
Next up: trenching for each of the three towers since their concrete pads have been poured. More soon!
Greetings from the future! 👋
We’re looking to stack clusters of H100s/H200s (and B300s?) after we’ve finished building out our own fiber, cellular, and microwave backhauls on top of everything else we’re doing.
On that note, the lightning arrest equipment arrived and I pick it up this coming week and then I start digging trenches through solid rock for that.
Next up at the ranch: lightning protection for three of our five 40' comms towers. Yet again, @ZacharySisson3 came through, helping us plan the grounding.
The rock here is too hard to drive ground rods straight down, so we're laying 10' copper-bonded rods flat in 30" deep trenches instead. Per the latest code guidance from a supplier and a sit-down with our electrical supply house, each tower leg gets its own 15' lead of #2 solid copper running out to its rod.
At each tower, the three trenches fan out 45° apart in what's called a crow's foot. Spreading the rods out keeps them from crowding the same patch of soil, which lowers the overall resistance and gives a strike several paths into the ground instead of one.
Each rod will get packed in Ultrafill G.E.M. (Ground Enhancement Material), a conductive backfill that lowers the soil's resistance around it, so a lightning strike dumps into the earth instead of hunting for a path through our gear.
It was an absolute pleasure to attend Jake and Jonah's event last night! Thanks for having us, y'all!
> who wants to host the next one?
At some point, we'll definitely host at our place. I think we could pitch tents and have a formal Texas Pasture Party when the weather is right. Bonus points if people want to go hands-on and in the same vein, demo their works here at @wwwLiveFarm.
HISTORICAL MOMENT
First Austin hard tech bonfire was a massive success. Thanks to everyone who showed up and especially @thesalomander for hosting in his backyard.
Let's make this the first of many, who wants to host the next one?
Here’s to new friends, solving difficult problems, and many more to come! ❤️
nitter.cf/thesalomander/status/2…
We would be honored; we love @JoshuaSteinman of @GalvanickCo.
Current crisis: arresting lightning on 40' comms towers.
Current status: bots among teammates researching & communicating with each other, while we sit at high level, babysitting and proofreading, before setting out with some of our high school interns, backhoe, jackhammer, etc.
YES.
Courage is contagious. 🇺🇸
A very special thank you to @Andercot, @CaitlinCloud9, and so many others.
We’re trying to decompress from last week’s @deeptechweek but have been in back-to-back meetings all this week as a result, including just wrapping up another dinner meeting tonight, thanks to such an importance conference.
A very special thank you to @Andercot for doing this ❤️
The lightning arrest saga drags on. 🌩️
This is one of those examples where @ZacharySisson3 is an MVP and has been taking care of running @wwwLiveFarm in my absence while I was at @deeptechweek Austin, with me chiming in only when I get flagged by Zachary and/or one of my bots.
One of our interns from Purdue University just sent this post to me.
At @wwwLiveFarm, we have one trick that we’ve been sitting on for a while. It’s just a theory, and while I think it will work, we’ll only know after we try it.
Polyethylene contains approximately 46 megajoules of chemical energy per kilogram (about ten times the energy content of TNT by mass) stored stably in its carbon-hydrogen bonds rather than as explosive potential.
The Oak Ridge molten-salt process announced this week is essentially an engineered way to release that energy as liquid fuel rather than letting it sit in a landfill.
>We may be leaving the cyberpunk era and entering the cowboy futurism era.
Y'ALL SEE?!
I didn't get to finish hearing @Andercot's take on some of this at nuclear afterparty and still need to bug him about it, but more are seeing it.
Solarpunk @wwwLiveFarm future, here we come!
We took the kids to Japan last month. It was my 3rd trip, Sara’s 2nd, & their 1st. They of course loved it.
But a few days into Tokyo they said something that was more profound than I think they realized, “It’s not futuristic.”
Before the trip they had watched a bunch of videos showing how Tokyo was going to feel like the future (It’s how we ended up at a capybara cafe.)
And they really did love Japan. In Tokyo we ended up at the fish market almost every morning because they wanted to keep going back and try different foods. Blowtorched scallops, oysters, and BBQ octopus were the favorites.
We had Kobe beef, made our own chopsticks, went to the Nintendo Museum, had deer bow to us in Nara. It was an incredible trip. I highly recommend it, especially with elementary/middle school-age kids.
But their observation was quite specific. There were no Cybercabs, no Waymos, no delivery robots on the sidewalk, all things they see every day in Austin.
I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s (don't do the math please 🙏). I grew up on anime and cyberpunk, and later Blade Runner and Akira. Tokyo was the image of the future.
Even one of my kids’ favorite movies, Big Hero 6, imagines the future as a mashup of San Francisco and Tokyo.
My kids went all the way to Tokyo expecting to see the future and instead the future was at home.
We may be leaving the cyberpunk era and entering the cowboy futurism era.
Nuclear Reactor
The conversation that I just had with some of the folks is what does a future look like with nuclear reactors onsite at a place like @wwwLiveFarm? One of those questions to be answered WHEN that day comes: synthesizing complex hydrocarbons onsite for tractor fuel
New Hampshire has been working towards this, btw.
Flashback:
nitter.cf/wwwLiveFarm/status/207…
Good talk with DJ REALEZT about playing a future show when we open up to the public.
At present, we’re tunnel-visioned on building at the moment.
Most difficult part of beef production is regulatory capture, which is why I’ve been slow-walking our grazing block and diverting all our resources to advancing our technology and techniques to reduce production costs while maximizing output.
“Everything I want to do is illegal”
Deep Tech Week has started, and it’s been INCREDIBLE!
THANK YOU @ANDERCOT FOR PUTTING THIS ON!
