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So what is the practical use of this? Let's say that I'm not an engineer or a researcher or a coder, but would like to set some of these units up to collect wa
by Ansil849 5y ago
So what is the practical use of this?
Let's say that I'm not an engineer or a researcher or a coder, but would like to set some of these units up to collect water. How do I do so? Do I approach someone to build this for me (who?)? How much can I expect it to cost?
In other words, how can I actualize this vision:
> So the H2E team asked: “What if you could put the power to generate daily drinking water into the hands of individuals, no matter where they live, by creating an affordable, easy to use device that harvests water from the air and is powered by the sun?"
- signalblur 5y agoPotentially as a water source for data center cooling? Not sure if it’d scale to those needs
- Ansil849 5y agoMy question was more, how does this help individuals without access to clean water, not a dystopian 'how can it be co-opted by corporations for business ends', but I appreciate the varying definitions of "practical" people have.
- emteycz 5y agoPeople need DCs too, not just corporations.
- Ansil849 5y agoYeah sure, but 1) prior to needing DCs, people need clean drinking water, and 2) the subset of people who need DCs is vastly smaller than those who need clean drinking water.
- emteycz 5y agoWell I'm sure we can look at both problems at the same time.
- braingenious 5y agoWait, what? What exactly is a data center by your definition? What individuals (that are entirely disconnected from corporations) need them? How many individuals have personal data centers of such a scale that they would need to produce liquid water on-site for their computing needs? I genuinely believe you’ve described an entirely theoretical person that doesn’t reside in this universe.
- tomrod 5y agoI need one to host successful blogs and my data hoarding.
- emteycz 5y agoPeople need institutions to run functioning societies. These (public) institutions are one of the most traditional users of large-scale computing. Even in 60s there was a lot of computing done by public institutions. To fulfill the requirements of modern life, DCs are a must. Most modern buildings have at least few racks of compute/storage for services like TV/phone/internet, camera recordings, etc. Even family houses have small racks nowadays.
- braingenious 5y agoI’m aware that people and institutions need and have computing devices. What qualifies as a data center?
- jimmydorry 5y agoThis site is likely not hosted out of a person's closet, hence you commenting here is likely a product of a data centre. Ignoring this specific example, a majority of the population uses social media for leisure and online tools for work (email, banking, etc.). A majority of interconnects between ISPs and networks are hosted in data centres too... so there wouldn't be much of an internet without them. If you closed all data centres over night, the majority of the above would disappear and certainly would not be able to scale as large as it had without data centres... hence, a majority of people need data centres to maintain their current standard of living.
- 5y ago
- krisoft 5y ago> My question was more, how does this help individuals without access to clean water If the principle of it is sound, which I cannot verify, then by a manufacturer picking up the idea. Developing it into a product and selling it to individuals. They are basically saying (paraphrasing) "Hey we suck at manufacturing things at scale, so we won't continue with this idea. But we don't want to let our learnings go to waste. Go ahead and learn from our experiments and mistakes. Maybe one of you out there can make it work as a product."
- 8note 5y agoOpen sourcing a dehumidier isn't very exciting, mind you
- emteycz 5y agoI think it's very exciting. I'd love to have everything in/around my house open source.
- samstave 5y ago
- dylan604 5y agoWhat a totally disingenuous way to recieve the comment's spirit, which takes some serious miscontruing to take it to wherever you're trying to take it.
- samstave 5y agoThey way I misconstrued it was to assume that the door was wide open for a a fitting joke. :-)
- dylan604 5y agoSuch a lowbrow cheap joke to assume that open source means "come take all my stuff" vs "i've made this to share with everyone" which does a disservice to open source more than it is funny.
- jcranberry 5y agoConsidering they said allowing others to build on this progress I would imagine that they have not achieved their stated goal yet: >The team aimed to build a highly lightweight, portable, cheap (<5% of user’s income) device that an individual could use to produce 5L of drinking water per day.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago> dystopian 'how can it be co-opted by corporations for business ends' Why is it "dystopian" and "co-opting" if a company uses a technology like this to operate in a more environmentally friendly way? People love to shit on companies (not specific ones, just "big companies" as a concept in general), completely ignoring where our standard of living comes from.
- marcellus23 5y agoConsidering the project is self-described as a way to get drinking water into peoples hands, it certainly seems a bit dystopian to immediately jump to using this to collect water for DC’s… especially considering the original comment was asking “how do you build this”, not “what could you use this for”
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y agoI'd understand this more if the two uses would somehow conflict, e.g. by competing for a limited resource. But here? If anything, this is going to either preserve other water sources for others, or put more money behind the technology.
- icegreentea2 5y agoThe prototype described is tricky. Basically because they want low unit cost, they had to assume mass manufacture techniques such as vacuum forming. This means that the cost of small builds will be quite high (since there's a lot of jigging and molds that have to be 3d printed/CNC'd). Unfortunately, they don't have a BOM cost listed anywhere I've been able to find. But also because this is a prototype, and they wanted to be able to tinker and measure, there's lots of design features and parts that are quite expensive and not really needed. Assembly also appears to be tricky and time consuming with non-trivial risk of damaging parts that then need to be repaired. So ultimately you have a design and plan that's neither directly suitable for mass-production or low volume production (which is fine! it's a prototype! it's super not done). The prototype as described would likely form an acceptable basis for further revision. You could probably go to a mechanical engineering design/consulting/prototyping firm with this and ask them to make it real with minimal changes (removing extraneous measurement devices, maybe swap out some of the grommets). It'd probably cost you like 50k at least to get your first one. Second one probably will cost like 100 bucks range.
- screenbreakout 5y agoWouldn't producing prototypes like these with expert manual artisans in less "developed" countries be scales cheaper? like 500$?
- dawsmik 5y agoThere is already a similar device on the market called a dehumidifier. It takes a fair amount of electricity and costs over $150. I think the core of the problem may be the amount of energy it takes to harvest water vapor, especially in arid conditions. (Likely the areas where the need is greatest.)
- adrianwaj 5y agoAre there any sites that help build groups around current and upcoming open-source projects, and also encourage people to make stuff open-source - perhaps with pledges? ... a more business-focused GitHub. ... an OpenSea for inventors. Imagine if money spent on NFTs would go to cool projects instead of avatars!
- kickout 5y agoAlso imagine if money spent on stock buybacks went somewhere productive. :/
- jimmydorry 5y agoIf a company can't think of anything useful and cost-effective to spend their money on, giving that money back in the way that passes through the largest portion of it is the most productive thing they could do. Let the investors allocate their money efficiently, rather than buying a gold mine as a movie theatre company (as an example).
- ineedasername 5y agorather than buying a gold mine as a movie theatre That's a pretty random example. Crypto? Maybe. But it's not like AMC is going to randomly get into the actual physical mining busin-- (hold on, it's 2022, lmgt just in case) Yes, a perfectly good example.
- jimmydorry 5y agoYes, very 2022-esque. xD
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago> Are there any sites that help build groups around current and upcoming open-source projects, and also encourage people to make stuff open-source - perhaps with pledges? Open Collective is designed to do exactly that: https://opencollective.com/ https://opencollective.com/
- ineedasername 5y agoMy guess is that if there were clear answers to those questions then the project might not have been shutdown. The hope is that someone or some other project might find a piece of this useful, or more optimistically that someone will find a way past any of the problems that made X take a pass on it. Or if none of that happens, at the very least it serves as a free bit of knowledge telling others going down this path "it didn't work"
- seltzered_ 5y agoI'm thinking wildly here and not getting into technicals, but it could also be seen not necessarily for humans but also for ecosystem restoration efforts in harsh remote environments. For example, while I have some viability questions the company Terraformation has been trial'ing photovoltaic solar powered water desalinization (using brackish wells as a source) in deforested areas for water - https://www.terraformation.com/blog/solar-powered-desalination-reverse-desertification https://www.terraformation.com/blog/solar-powered-desalinati... If I understand correctly (still learning and might be wrong), another way to frame this is in perceiving water vapor itself - you can be in desertifying areas and yet supposedly have plenty of water vapor to a lack of evapotranspiration. This is what some have framed 'the second leg of anthropogenic climate change' - ( https://museecology.com/2020/10/30/15-professor-millan-the-second-leg-of-climate-change/ https://museecology.com/2020/10/30/15-professor-millan-the-s... , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf4jwkhCk_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf4jwkhCk_A - "Desert or rainforest" , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdcsQw3ma_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdcsQw3ma_Y - "Restoring the Water Cycle 1" )
- torginus 5y agoNone. Or alternatively, gathering Reddit/HN karma or channeling NGO funds into overpriced useless science projects instead of helping people. Thunderf00t has made a ton of videos about devices like this, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGTRX6pZSns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGTRX6pZSns The TLDW version is these devices are fancy dehumidifiers. They need a ton of power, and lots of air humidity to be practical, which are exactly not the conditions these devices are advertised to operate in. And even then, the water they produce is dirty, so it needs to be purified and treated to be actually drinkable. Even if we solve all these challenges, it turns out that doing something dumb and low tech, like transporting drinking water on trucks is actually a lot more efficient. This is another one in the long list of devices designed to help those hypothetical poor people, like OLPC and the Gravity Light. It turns out these people have already solved these issues, and much better, usually with off-the-shelf alternatives and a bit of ingenuity.