Countdown to Completion

This is it!  We are finally within one month of the completion of the new Helios V solar coffee roaster.  All the parts are either ordered or are in hand, there is some minimal fabrication left to do, and some permits and items to be installed in the building.  Right now, the entire wholesale side is a disaster!  I have installed an 8 x 10 foot metal floor that will be the location for the indoor roasting system.  The newly installed PV array on the roof will be hooked up with a net meter by the end of this week, and I am figuring out how to fit all of the air handling equipment into the space.  Looking forward to having this whole thing together so I can stop worrying about it EVER being done! It's been a year in the making since we first presented the project to the City of Pueblo and received their blessing through an economic development grant through PEDCO. 

Solar Stepping Motor Available for Download!

Hello to all of you following the Open Sun Project.  After seven months of Research and Development, the plans for building your very own weatherized stepping gear motor are online on the Open Sun Project website.  Please go there and download the PDF, which details step-by-step instructions for creating your own outdoor robotic motor for your own solar tracking projects.  It is really the first of four planned publications for the project.  The motor will be the 'prime mover' for all the other parts to follow, so it was a big step.  Thank you for following us, and please pass our project on, if you know others who might be interested in experimenting with solar or other outdoor robotic projects that may make use of our system: 

Download the OSP-M1 Publication (PDF)

New Shop Opened, Resuming Open Sun Project!

Many thanks to those of you who participated in our first attempt at fund-raising through KickStarter.  Though we did not reach our goal, it was wonderful to see the support and read comments from the many people who made pledges.  Your interest is greatly appreciated!

The Open Sun Project took back burner to a more pressing issue in early June when we were told by management of the Pueblo Mall that we had to vacate our shop in order to make room for a hat store.  It was within the contract rights for them to do so, but it was troubling to be given only 4 days remove our entire business.  Now, a month later, we have a new coffee shop up and running in a drive-through location.  We have been able to hire back many of the employees from the mall shop, and I have been working to publicize the new shop. 

Those fires extinguished (or at least shoveled back into the fireplace where they belong), I can finally give this project the attention it deserves, and provide some updates as well. 

Scope and Funding:
Thanks to PEDCO and the City of Pueblo, Solar Roast Coffee LLC has received an economic development grant to improve our coffee wholesale department and to create jobs.  We have finally been able to make some use of these funds, and have figured out a way to complete our solar roaster project with the available support. The original intention of the Open Sun Project was to raise funds to complete a large solar concentrator project that was to be installed on the roof of a leased bus garage space.  The project was going to take about 18 months from this June, and would involve some serious R&D in order to pull it off.  Our ability to do this in a timely manner, and to do it practically, has been subject to much concern after all the uncertainty with having to move our shop etc.  Now that it has stabilized, we have been able to approach it with a new, more level-headed approach.

The New Plan:
Rather than installing a large experimental concentrator on a bus garage, we have opted to install an array of standard photovoltaic solar panels on the roof of our downtown coffee shop.  The roaster will then be powered via a large electrical heater, which I am in the process of installing.  This approach, though a bit more expensive in the hardware outlay, has some serious advantages:  First, the solar technology is mature and I can simply pay someone to install it.  It is guaranteed to work, and is insured and maintenance-free.  Secondly, since it is at our coffee shop location, we will be able to take advantage of cost savings in the electric bill for the cafe when not roasting coffee.  (The previous design only produced heat energy, so there was no real use for the solar power if not roasting coffee. At least not at first.)  Third, the time to completion for the whole project is now less than 4 months away.  This is an excellent development, and will have us 'up and running' well ahead of our previous schedule, and bodes well for actually achieving our goals laid out with the economic development board!  We have already hired our first full-time wholesale manager, and she is kicking butt!

Open Source Technology:
As for the open-source technology we were developing under the original Open Sun Project, I have a complete working prototype for a weatherproof low-cost heliostat.  It uses a pair of weatherized stepping gear motors, also developed here for the project.  I am continuing to work with Ben Aiken, programmer, friend & cousin, to create a suite of software modules for implementing a tracked array.  We plan to release the open-source technology package some time this fall.  The package will contain my research and development notes and a full set of plans for creating these heliostats, and will also contain the software notes, pseudo-code, and working JAVA based implementations of the software.  When all is said and done, we'll have something really great to show for the work we started.  Please stay tuned to our site "OpenSunProject.com" for the full publication. 

Time and Space: A schedule is formed!

The past couple weeks have seen some progress in my shifting gears from Coffee Shop to Solar Research & Development.  My wife has started working at the office and is fielding most of the calls & taking the weekly coffee orders.  She is also helping with much of the random delivering and picking-up of stuff! 

Parts are arriving from suppliers, and I am nearly ready to begin assembly in earnest of the first fully functioning heliostat motor unit.  I am also formalizing the bounds of the completed array and double-checking all the requirements for the heliostats and the other components. 

In other news, I will be more or less free to work on this 3 days a week + weekends after this month, that is once we create a TV commercial together for our coffee shops!  We need to boost our retail sales to get over the typical June-July cafe slump.  I'm hanging up posters for our new line of smoothies tomorrow.

It IS difficult to put together coherent time at the moment.  More on this later.

Now on Kickstarter

As of this morning, Solar Roast Coffee's Open Sun Project is on Kickstarter.  Check it out and watch our goofy short video presentation!    Link: Solar Roast KickStarter

Accepted to Kickstarter!

It's been a fair amount of preparation to get my whole fund-raising project organized, but I just found out that Solar Roast Coffee & the Open Sun Project has been accepted by Kickstarter.com!  For those of you who don't know, Kickstarter is an amazing online peer-to-peer fund-raising site that lets individuals pledge their support to projects.  The projects range from arts to film to science & technology and all share in the spirit of open-source & creative do-it-yourself-ness.  I'm pleased as all getup to be part of that crowd! 

     I'm spending the rest of the afternoon in After Effects, Lightwave, and Final Cut tweaking the short video for the website... geez, wish I had a better microphone when I was shooting.   Next time!

I have nearly all the parts now to build a full "Sigma-Style" heliostat for testing.  I just need band-saw blades and to clear the last of the mess out of the shop.  My wife is making this week's sales calls for me at the office.  (Actually, it seems like more people order coffee from a well-spoken female than from a goofy sounding scatterbrained dude like myself... go figure!) 

Workshop Nearly Back Together!

After a week and a half of cleaning, moving tools, and re-organizing the basement, my workshop is now nearly reconstituted.  It was in early January when I scavenged every last useful tool from my house and the coffee shop, and put them in the Camera Craft garage.  It took 3.5 months to build the helios 5 roaster oven from sheet metal and scraps & get it all working.  Now that it's temporarily set up in the back of the downtown shop, I have vacated the garage until we are ready to install the solar power system.  Costs less to just rent it as storage for the time being, than to be moved in and using it before it is strictly necessary.
     Looked into buying the next round of carbon credits this week in order to offset the fuel we are burning in the meantime.  We were featured in a segment on News First 5 this friday & we showed them our helios 3 roaster.  It's kind of an inconvenient time right now, because everything is in the works, but nothing is complete yet:

->  He helios 4 is decomissioned as of last week & pending sale to PRI for conversion to a solar plastics melter.

-> The Helios 5 is running fine, albeit on natural gas.  (It has finally stopped scraping and eating coffee beans, which is an excellent development.  This pile of welded sheet metal just needed some time to get used to the idea of being a coffee roaster!) 

-> I have three non-functioning heliostats in the lab.  Now that I have my shop back under one roof, I will be able to make some progress on this front.  I have switched my plans away from the use of linear motors, and am going to experiment with worm-gear driven motors.  I was initally looking at a classic "T-pole" design, or a "U" type yolk to hold the mirror.  I am now entertaining the idea of a  "∑" (sigma) shaped framework for holding each mirror and a pair of motor boxes.  More on this later. 

Having a glass of wine with the wife and reading about stirling engines.  A wonderful Saturday evening!

Into the Sun

Rounding out the week bagging the last of the orders.  It's going to take a feat of organization to organize our coffee shop and wholesale department so as to extricate myself from the day to day operations.  I'm going to have to figure out how to put more time into this solar design project in the next month or two.  Within three months, I will be working full-time on the R&D for the new heliostat motors. 
      I had 4 glass mirrors cut to scale and picked them up yesterday.  The development plan looks something like this, in rough outline:

1) Build and Test motor
         1000 cycles  (mechanics durability)
          Freezer test  (low temp to -10˚F)
          Oven test  (Pueblo Summer temp up to 120˚F)
          Bathtub test (water immersion)

2) Build and Test single Heliostat
          Test accuracy & repeatability to  1/16˚ per axis
          Car-Roof-Driving Test (aka wind-tunnel testing for high wind stowing capability)
          Coffee-Shop-Ice Drop (aka testing under hail-impact conditions)
          Sun Track to Target -I'll test it with an ad-hoc controller to target a spot in my back yard.

3)  Build and test 5 Heliostats
         Finalizing the control scheme electronics
         Demonstrating a practical set-up procedure and calibration cycle
         Demonstrate safety procedures and guidance corridores (mirrors must not shin in windows!)

4)  1/8 Scale array test:  25 Mirrors in my back yard and on-target
         Test calibration procedure for 25 mirrors on wooden frame
         Test targeting control system
         Test all safety systems
         Make last changes for mass-production of heliostats.

5) Manufacture remaining 200 heliostats, set up on bus garage in downtown Pueblo

           (More detail to follow!)

R&D Parts Ordered

Ordered worm gears today for testing one kind of stepper motor assembly. (Ordered them from SDP/SI online.  There is some stuff on smallparts.com.)   I visited a metal yard here in Pueblo (Speken) and found that my preferred stepper motor slides snugly into 2x4" rectangular tube, so I bought a length of that.  I then ordered a set of rectangular plastic inserts for the ends of the pipe.  My plan is to create rigid steel housings for the motors from short sections of rectangular tubing.  By simply using short sections of this tough construction material, I should be able to produce these things en-mass for low material cost and have them be rather strong.  I will fit the worm gear, bearings, and potentially some driver circuitry into each rigid weatherproof box.  Each mirror will get two of them. 
    I also ordered a set of four glass mirrors from Binswanger glass in Pueblo.  It's costly to have a local place custom cut glass mirror.  I'm going to have to price out delivery of 4x8' sheets of this stuff and build a table jig for cutting these things myself when it's time to go into full production.  Anybody know where to buy 1/4" thick glass mirror in large sheets?

Got a dozen coffee orders wrapped up labeled & my wife Lindsay is dropping it at Fedex.  Tomorrow we have some private label coffees to finish.  I'll round out the week with a start of the formal design work for the heliostats. (How accurate do they actually need to be, how strong, how fast?)

In the Course of a Day

Today, I vacuumed out a coffee roaster, hefted 150 pound coffee bags, called 50 of our wholesale clients, discussed recycling with some regulars of the shop, called back all the folks on the answering machine, installed coffee brewers at City Diner in downtown pueblo, put a brewer in the new library at CSU Pueblo, made new labels and adverts in Illustrator, e-mailed some of our vendors, updated the video slide-show screens at the mall and downtown,  and finally sat down to re-collect thoughts about solar power.  It's amazing how busy Tuesdays can be!  I feel like I saw a thousand or so people coming in and out of the coffee shop.  I'm just sitting down with a catalog of gears to order a set of parts for a heliostat prototype.  That is after all what I'm SUPPOSED to be doing -building a solar heat source for this roaster!

Despite some of these all-involving days at the coffee shop, progress is being made.  There is a decent orderly way in which everything must be accomplished.  The most immediate part of my outline looks something like this:


1.) Quantify all of the needed attributes and variables for these small heliostats.  I need to formally set down how accurate these things need to be, how much force the motors must produce, and how much movement is permissible. 

2.) Once that is done, I need to settle my year-long debate once and for all about my motors:
Linear Motor gearing vs. worm-gear motor gearing.

Linear motors are easy to build from low cost parts, but produce non-uniform movement of the mirror over their range.  Worm gear motors produce true rotary motion with motor steps correlating directly to angular units of rotation over the whole range of movment.  It is more difficult and expensive, however, to purchase/assemble worm gear drive systems.  Especially considering that 220 heliostats means 440 of them!  (vertical and horizontal movement for each mirror.) 

Help me end this internal debate!  (I'm ordering parts tonight and will build heliostats of each kind, keep track of the cost, and then test their functionality.) 

Meanwhile, I think I need to get a cup of coffee!

New Coffee Roaster, New Project, New Future!

This week saw the first successful use of the brand-new coffee roaster machine, the Helios V.  That is, the coffee-roasting part of it!  I constructed it from sheet metal and ordered parts in a rented bus garage down the street.  We have it set up in the back of our coffee shop on 3rd & Main in Pueblo,  and we're running it through its paces.  There are plenty of things bumping when they shouldn't, beans popping through where they don't belong, and smoke billowing out into the crowded cafe- but over all  a success!  It roasts evenly, all-be-it with heat from natural gas.

    It always seems like the conclusion of one project is, in fact, the start of a new one!  In this case, it is now finally time to start on the new concentrator.  One year from today, this same roaster will be producing excellent coffee, and will be powered entirely with energy from the sun!  (Hopefully with issues of the bumps, beans, and billowing resolved!)
    
Our previous solar coffee roaster is, in the mean time, going to be converted into a solar plastics recycling machine.

   It's my first open-source technology project, and the first time anybody's made a focused and funded effort to create a full-scale commercial solar power tower and then place it into the public domain.  As several close business advisers have warned me, it is a risk to give away what might be sold.  It is my belief, though, that the potential gains justify the risk, and that open-source technologies are the paving stones and foundations of a newer brighter version of the future! 

For periodic updates on these projects and all the adventures along the way, please stay tuned to this blog.
Sincerely,
     David Hartkop
Owner & Inventor, Solar Roast Coffee & The Open Sun Project