RE: Somebody Prove this is AI Please - Hive.Blog users will see a blank post. Use Peakd to see this Post.
You are viewing a single comment's thread:
"Inkjets are standard paper printers."
You can use them for that, as the manufacturers intended, but they can also print on sheets of PET, which is what beverage containers like water bottles are made of, and using inks with metallic and graphene particles they can print conductive traces to make circuits, and solar panels.
They can print on anything you can feed through them ink will stick to. They can be used to print living cells onto scaffolds of cartilage as well, but the print head must be freed from it's enclosure, and the scaffold won't feed through a paper carriage system, obviously. Tests reveal that print heads with smaller jets better control delivery of cells, producing better results. Testing continues.
"...producing photovoltaic cells is still a "globalism"-dependent thing..."
Not since 2008. If you search you will find links to published papers in which ordinary inkjet printers have been used to produce solar panels, amongst many other things.
"...size of the printers determines how much you can do with them."
A couple years ago Creality came out with a 3D printer that used a conveyor belt as the print bed, essentially enabling parts to be as long as you want.
"...that could all be horseshit..."
It's not. Pyrolysis is a method to break down organic matter using heat in an anoxic environment so that the hot hydrocarbons don't burn immediately, but can be distilled, as that kid is doing*, or can be piped to an ordinary internal combustion engine while in a gaseous state. During WWII thousands of people across Europe had no access to petrol to power automobiles, so they used pyrolysis to make wood gas and ran their cars off the carbon monoxide gas produced by smoldering wood. People still do this today, and there is an American company selling complete turnkey wood gas generators that can drop into the back of a pickup. The FDA produced a pamphlet during the war showing farmers how to run their tractors off wood gas, due to fuel shortages.
"...solar and wind?"
Yes, and other mechanisms too, such as wood gas and geothermal. A couple feet down the soil is always ~55 F, and there's also passive solar.
"...there's regulation involved in that..." Jurisdictions vary. Regulations only matter when you have the luxury of caring what someone else says you can and can't do. In an apocalyptic catastrophe, as in WWII, they won't matter much.
"My father's neighbor built and ran a aquaponics greenhouse with fish..."
I have just finished the greenhouse structure, have just acquired a suitable tank for some fish, and some food grade plastic barrels for filtering waste water through the hydroponic medium. I'm still working on the innards of the system, but hopefully will be up and running sometime this winter.
"...Oct 1 they announced they had gotten a 10x performance increase..."
That's incredibly good news. These are all relatively new techs, and early adopters and hobbyists are trying all kinds of things. For example, if you're familiar with wire feed welding, there's people trying to mount those in 3D printers. They are very hot, though, and aren't very precise. Yet. Using metals besides steel (brazing instead of welding) might be a lot cooler and easier to manage. The fervent ferment of development is ongoing. AI, particularly, is well suited to automating repeatable production tasks and maintenance, and some very powerful FOSS AI has been released in the wild coders might adapt for automating a variety of DIY production tools.
Chickens, ducks, and etc. are all very important. There aren't many foods as nutritious as eggs.
Edit: *Pyrolizing plastic produces horribly toxic gases. Wood is much cleaner.
I looked into the inkjet solar cells, and the idea was abandoned after it took off in 2008. I had honestly never heard of this being done before so it sounded insane to me reading it here.
But yes it appears photo-cells are much less complicated than I thought.
I was thinking of them as analog to the semiconductors used in computers, but even then there's a WIDE berth between the Intel/AMD/ARM chips in computers/phones vs the much simpler IC's in your car's key-fob.
Perskovite is a mineral that was discovered in the Ural mountains of Russia, and Perskovite cells have caused renewed interest in inkjet printing.
A regular Perskovite cell has about 25% solar efficiency, and printing them with inkjets can yield 17% efficiency.
I don't know if it's considered a semiconductor though.
The original pieces I read about inkjet printing of solar cells required making the "ink" from a semiconductor substance. If I'm reading this right Perskovite crystals are somewhat different from traditional semiconductors, but they have properties that can be used for photo-electrolysis, some capacitors, and LED's.
They also require doping with another material.
Doping is a process that also happens in production of traditional semiconductors.
Virtually all circuit-boards today are PCB's or printed-circuit-boards. The older methods still used in prototyping were bread-boards. In the end it's all just circuitry really, but shrinking down the size and refining the materials is how we fit these things into tiny packages. Also, Moore's Law or the shrinking of semiconductor processes has led to them being able to do more cycles-per-second in smaller and smaller packages with less heat generation.
But the beautiful thing is that if we have the knowledge we can buy cheap very-capable products and assemble them into complex functions.
For instance, the Raspberry-Pi created a new market and it was intended for teaching computer science and engineering to high-school students.
His neighbors erected a rather large greenhouse in the shape of the half-tube aircraft hanger style. It's probably about 25-ft high, and maybe a little wider across. I think they used the "natural pond" landscape liner inside of wooden square tanks, and they have those blue barrels setup there near them as well.