Open Source Tractor • Hacker News Board

Re: Open Source Tractor

#121

Post by thechao » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 7:58 PM UTC

WhisperingShiba wrote: post #97

beckman466 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the west is literally trying to provoke a huge war with china because china is no longer dependent on the west's intellectual property. your framing seems ignorant to me. Vijay Prashad: What's the Left to Do in a World on Fire? | China and the Left , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd8w3ONjv6Y Vijay Prashad: No Cold War with China , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj1ggllXmws

This is a controversial opinion, but I agree. The global west is realizing it done goofed up; because China does not give a shit about IP and now has the intellectual capability to successfully produce new products which compete with US product. The good news is that China's economy is actually a bigger mess than ours somehow, despite our limited means of production. Everyone is too scared of nuclear war, but the act…

Isn't this the same situation that the USA eventually found itself in with respect to the USSR? I think the whole cold war can be re-envisioned as a socioeconomic conflict.

Re: Open Source Tractor

#122

Post by bri3d » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 8:04 PM UTC

mod wrote: post #119

I'm sorry, maybe it's just me--but none or almost none of these projects have actual plans to build them! Everything is a wiki stub. Almost all the topics have unanswered questions going back to 2013. Some have a nice top-level "blueprint" looking infographic, and then absolutely zero details about building them. I'm not sure how to use this project, although given my 40 acres and great desire to DIY, I should be a p…

This is pretty much the wrong website. You want this: https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Civilization_Starter...

Re: Open Source Tractor

#123

Post by brezelgoring » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 8:05 PM UTC

5faulker wrote: post #102

rmason wrote: post #51

This project is terrific. People are critical of what it doesn't do, I'm in awe of what it does do. You're going to have little two man shops in Africa and Asia cranking these out and changing agriculture in their part of the world. This demonstrates the power of open source. These engineers are to be commended.

At the holistic level, their impact on the ecology is still to be known though.

Living in South America all my life, and I know this is anecdotal, ecology is always second to economic progress.

You can't go to a [settlement] (https://sfo2.digitaloceanspaces.com/elpaiscr/2019/09/Asentam...) and tell them not to use certain tools because they might not be ecological.

I'm not discarding your concern though, I understand its impact is not known, I just wanted to say it likely won't be a factor in the decision-making of those that use this tech.

Re: Open Source Tractor

#124

Post by efitz » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 8:14 PM UTC

scrooched_moose wrote: post #62

efitz wrote: post #50

Patents expire after 20 years or so. Why not just take a 25 year old tractor, 3d model it, make your small improvements and updates, and then start working on value adds like parts pipelines, data & gps driven agriculture, etc

Modeling a tractor in CAD isn't the issue. Manufacturing it is. A 25 year old tractor design (probably out to 75+ year old tractors even) still has hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure and tooling behind it. Molds or dies for a single part can easily reach into 6 figures, without taking into account the $10 million injection molding machine. The simplifications you could do would be limited, as every des…

Then I’m unsure what problem the project is trying to solve.

We have a real problem today with affordability and right to repair. My wife’s family are rice farmers from rural Thailand. My father in law had tears in his eyes when I bought him a $25k basic Kubota tractor; his individual productivity went through the roof while the amount of backbreaking work he had to do fell. Small time agriculture does not pay enough for such folks to make such a purchase on their own, and a major repair could still be out of reach. I thought this project was trying to address these problems. I don’t see such people as having to tooling or time to build their own tractor.

As for “post apocalyptic”- I will band with others with guns and tractors and use our guns to protect our tractors; I’m not interested in building a road warrior tractor; I’m interested in easy to repair.

Re: Open Source Tractor

#125

Post by coding123 » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

lazide wrote: post #101

Ericson2314 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like tractors are like AK-47s, kinda de facto grandfathered in before Neo-liberalism and Globalization made exporting IP law a big part part of of geopolitics.

Basic tractors, like the AK-47, are also designable by most decent mechanical engineering students without a lot of work if they spent an afternoon googling first for prior art (and that prior art has long had any patents expire). Which if there is an ecosystem related to this, that’s great as the manufacturing is where you need economies of scale pretty badly and everyone benefits from it. There is no also no need f…

https://www.harborfreight.com/9-hp-towable-backhoe-62365.htm...

You said basic. :shrug:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fK6EtRXqS4

Re: Open Source Tractor

#126

Post by SMAAART » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 8:23 PM UTC

This is a trend, not a fad.

A megatrend!

Re: Open Source Tractor

#127

Post by WhisperingShiba » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 8:25 PM UTC

thechao wrote: post #121

WhisperingShiba wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a controversial opinion, but I agree. The global west is realizing it done goofed up; because China does not give a shit about IP and now has the intellectual capability to successfully produce new products which compete with US product. The good news is that China's economy is actually a bigger mess than ours somehow, despite our limited means of production. Everyone is too scared of nuclear war, but the act…

Isn't this the same situation that the USA eventually found itself in with respect to the USSR? I think the whole cold war can be re-envisioned as a socioeconomic conflict.

I believe it so as well. I was just reinforcing that I don't believe conventional war can occur without a major technological innovation in missile defense. It all comes down to sociology-economics, which is in turn downstream of culture. Neither the USA or China have close to optimal culture, but even accounting for western propaganda, the United States is a much happier place.

Source: I met many Chinese people in college. Many of them were striving for success with such fervor because they wanted to stay in America.

Re: Open Source Tractor

#128

Post by silexia » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 8:36 PM UTC

rmason wrote: post #51

This project is terrific. People are critical of what it doesn't do, I'm in awe of what it does do. You're going to have little two man shops in Africa and Asia cranking these out and changing agriculture in their part of the world. This demonstrates the power of open source. These engineers are to be commended.

I agree! I would love to see this extended to excavators and bulldozers, these are way overpriced.

Re: Open Source Tractor

#129

Post by hinkley » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 8:46 PM UTC

AngryData wrote: post #105

hinkley wrote: post #49

I went looking for specialty equipment for moving logs a few years ago while researching a restoration project. That equipment is super expensive, so I went looking for a DIY solution, expecting to find something along the lines of the construction philosophy of the OST project. I know my way around a wrench and bolting something together is no problem for me. Especially if I can take it apart again to store it, sinc…

They should definitely look into welding, they will need it at some point anyways for repairs. And a stick welder is both cheap and perfect use case for welding heavy metal frames. It could even be powered off the engine to be used in the tractor.

Refresh my memory. A stick welder is an electric arc welder that uses a thin rod of metal as the contact point and the rod gets consumed to make the bead, right? That sounds pretty reasonable.

Re: Open Source Tractor

#130

Post by hinkley » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 8:52 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #98

hinkley wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did your parents teach you to only spray on the upwind passes, or were you huffing *cides half the time?

I wasn't doing much spraying to be honest, but we usually waited for relatively windless days to spray (not for health reasons, but usually because we didn't want to roundup the neighbors' crops/lawns/etc).

Oh that's true, I know that and I'm not sure why I didn't think of it. Herbicide drift is a nightmare scenario of horticulturalists. In certain circles people plan out earth berms and wind breaks of sacrificial plants so their flowers and vegetables don't get hit. Most of us aren't brave enough to build something on the edge of farmland, let alone in the middle of it. But there's always some masochist who will try. 'We' don't have a very high opinion of farmers spraying on a windy day.

Similarly flatlander recreational/club bicyclists don't have anything nice to say about farmers spraying anhydrous ammonia on a windy day. Luckily didn't happen very often, and never up close (>400 yards), but that's still enough to really get your attention.