The Netduino. Holy Grail Of .Net Micro Framework Devices. Seriously.
They're selling out. I have to wait for restock here in Australia to buy one.
The .NET Micro Framework sounded like the greatest idea in the history of embedded devices five years ago. Unfortunately with starter kits at $399 originally even for the cheapest evaluation boards, it wasn't really practical to think of using these in Vaults.
Many a night I have sort of dreamed in my head, "Somebody ought to take one of these super powerful super cheap boards like the Arduino or AVR and port the .NET Micro Framework to it to create a standalone SBC board you could develop multithreaded networked apps for on your PC in Visual Studio. That would definitely be the bomb. That's probably not going to happen any time soon." Here it is, though.
My plan is to get a bunch of these and port the BACNet stack to it for BACNet communication with Vault-OS. You could use it to do all kinds of tough, repetitive standalone jobs like external sensor monitoring, fuel and water management, battery and power management. It even occurred to me you could make this thing into a Vault-OS Sentry instead of an X86 and have that run on extremely low power when there is nobody in the shelter.
If I write the code for that I promise to open source it on the Vault-OS site.
11 comments:
Nothing easier than making your own pcb.. Why are you buying that arduino crap when you can get atmel samples and build your pcb for like 3$ ?!
All you need is cheap magazine pages, print with toner your circuits using freepcb, eaglepcb or else.
put a ATMega in there and a ENC28J60 (again sample) and a little power supply (LM317 or LM7805)
All in all, it should cost you very little (if you have some tools) .
Soldering iron, copper clad, toner (laser printer), etchant, atmega, avr studio (free), enc28j60 (free in sample), lm7805 (.50$) ..
You seem to have all those tools since you are a diyevr
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/8026971/Aliens-have-deactivated-British-and-US-nuclear-missiles-say-US-military-pilots.html
In case you haven't read it yet.
I had to think about whether or not to release the following info - but I figured Tex has been so good about sharing - that I wanted to do likewise. Besides, I figure the amount of work, brains and motivation it would take to do what I describe below will make it's own Plimsoll line between those who sink or swim. The information should only be useful to a certain kind of person.
Here's the thing - 99+ percent of even your best preppers don't really think outside the box - they just parrot what they see others doing. As a result, in a true grid down situation, they will whip out their AR-15, load up some mags then get themselves and their family members cut down in a hail of gunfire the first time they are forced to defend themselves against multiple attackers.
There is NO WAY you can defend, as a family, in a wood house, against multiple attackers. If I were on the attacking side, and for some reason you COULD manage to hold me off for a while, I'd just lob molotovs until I burned you out.
Now consider a system of Synapse wireless boards running stepper or servo motors aiming and firing beltfed 1919a4's ($500 in kit form - no BATF paperwork required). You can run them using gameboy controllers or joysticks or even your computer keyboard if necessary.
Something like this on steroids - only maybe not so automated :
http://www.paintballsentry.com/
Or just forget about the wireless part and hardwire it, running wires to something like this, what I am calling AWP's (automated weapons platforms) high on the walls surrounding your Vault - say two for each side of a square or for each side of a Vaughban star :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_fort
walls built with (John Novotny's) super simple & cheap rammed earth technique :
http://tinyurl.com/29w49x9
Now think for a moment ... given a clear field of fire, with lots of prior warnings (thanks to your mesh sensor network), with your family sitting relatively safe and snug underground in your Vault, how many simultaneous attackers could you hold off with 5 or 10 AWP's (assuming your attackers didn't come at you with tanks and or F-22's) ?
I'd say hundreds.
I'd say nothing would give your regular geek genius a better upper hand than something like this - other than not being found in the first place. Problem with that tho - is that even if the Vault saves your butt - after you come up for air, you are going to need some type of armed defensive fort like this to protect you from whatever or whoever is left.
This should do the trick.
Worst case, it would make deer hunting season extremely short LOL
kochevnik
Kochevnik, geek solutions are for an automated world. Geeks rule in complex societies, where others do the dirty work while they dablle with ideas and objects others fail to understand.
But you shouldn't underestimate the importance of social networks. They can protect you, or can get you killed. Even advanced techno-gizmos cannot do a lot against determined groups. Most people using a car to ram through walls, fences etc never would have found out this by themselves, but still they have see it done, heard about it, and will repeat it. Most humans are of the Cro-Magnon variety, i.e. repeaters / imitators (simians...)
Very little you can do against arson or ramming cars. And, yes, people WILL set your place on fire, even though your preps will get lost in the fire, because that's what pissed off people do. They'll starve anyway, so why not fry some smart bastard in the process ?
You're a smart guy : don't you remember school, and how smart kids were the closest these guys had to BERNIE MADOFF ? They hate our guts. I even heard some people say I'm jewish, because it suited their view of the situation better.
Preppers and survivalists will be open game. Heck, even makeshift "authorities" will be only too happy to use them as scapegoats (HOARDERS etc.)
The lone survivalist, as bright as he might be, stands no chance. Even if he did, he would die isolated ("I am legend", anyone ?). Vault-Co, when he'll come out of his shelter (by the time he would have had YEARS to finish his doodles, at last) he'll be so smart compared to those still around that they'll capture him, torture him to reveal the location of his "treasures", and then kill / eat him.
If mankind has any luck, one of his doodles will be found a couple of millenia in the future, becoming a new Antikythera mechanism ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism )
The real catch is to find a social network that will still be somewhat functional once SHTF starts. I have no real idea about what it would look like.
Ha - looks like the first part of my post never made it.
I had a long post about Synapse Wireless boards - which I think are the cat's meow - about $40 each, mesh wireless networking builtin, and also have digital I/O ports and an embedded Python interpreter. This is like a cross between an Arduino and a XBee.
http://www.synapse-wireless.com/
(they have a good forum there too)
If you're in a Vault you want to know what's going on outside as well - these would do the trick. You could hang six to eight sensors off one board. I plan on using Windows messaging to talk to my GUI app (written in Powerbuilder - which I have 15 years experience in) using a fit pc (7 watts)
http://www.fit-pc.com/web/
I havent seen anything as good as this - but not easy to pull off.
kochevnik
Solsys - I understand your point - truly I do. I haven't spent 30+ years thinking about this without exploring a lot of alternatives.
But I think your last paragraph is the key : "The real catch is to find a social network that will still be somewhat functional once SHTF starts. I have no real idea about what it would look like."
That's the thing - no one else knows what one would look like either, because, like the mythical Easter Bunny, such groups do not exist in real life. I know, I've looked. The only social group that I can think of that would stand a chance in a true grid down situation would be a family. Tribes in the past were all built on ties of blood - and even that is no guarantee of success - witness Cain & Abel.
So then, all you are left with in the real world is your nuclear family - I can be pretty sure my wife and kids wont eat me or betray me. But a family is short on manpower, so force multipliers like machines are necessary for those who won't or can't depend on social networks. And yes they are complex and complicated and subject to entropy - I get all that. But there really is NO alternative to get thru the first part of the collapse.
Social networks will INEVITABLY fail in the face of math like this :
http://www.grandpappy.info/hworst.htm
Especially read the section titled "How Long Will The Food Last ?"
I am not a believer like Tex, but one thing I think the bible gets dead nuts right is the concept of original sin - people at heart are basically selfish, nasty bastards, especially when placed under great pressure. My grandfather who lived as an adult thru the Great Depression said that the biggest lesson he learned from that time is that "People would do ANYTHING to keep what they had."
So Solsys - if you plan on relying on social networks - I truly wish you luck. But in my post above I provided a good workable solution to most all the problems you talked about. It's not workable for everyone of course, but it is for me - and maybe someone else with close to the same skillset. And any alternative I can picture just doesnt cut the mustard IMO.
If you're convinced I'm wrong, then I'd appreciate it if you could provide an example of a social network that you think could withstand the collapse.
kochevnik
Solsys - I understand your point - truly I do. I haven't spent 30+ years thinking about this without exploring a lot of alternatives.
But I think your last paragraph is the key : "The real catch is to find a social network that will still be somewhat functional once SHTF starts. I have no real idea about what it would look like."
That's the thing - no one else knows what one would look like either, because, like the mythical Easter Bunny, such groups do not exist in real life. I know, I've looked. The only social group that I can think of that would stand a chance in a true grid down situation would be a family. Tribes in the past were all built on ties of blood - and even that is no guarantee of success - witness Cain & Abel.
So then, all you are left with in the real world is your nuclear family - I can be pretty sure my wife and kids wont eat me or betray me. But a family is short on manpower, so force multipliers like machines are necessary for those who won't or can't depend on social networks. And yes they are complex and complicated and subject to entropy - I get all that. But there really is NO alternative to get thru the first part of the collapse.
Social networks will INEVITABLY fail in the face of math like this :
http://www.grandpappy.info/hworst.htm
Especially read the section titled "How Long Will The Food Last ?"
kochevnik
I am not a believer like Tex, but one thing I think the bible gets dead nuts right is the concept of original sin - people at heart are basically selfish, nasty bastards, especially when placed under great pressure. My grandfather who lived as an adult thru the Great Depression said that the biggest lesson he learned from that time is that "People would do ANYTHING to keep what they had."
So Solsys - if you plan on relying on social networks - I truly wish you luck. But in my post above I provided a good workable solution to most all the problems you talked about. It's not workable for everyone of course, but it is for me - and maybe someone else with close to the same skillset. And any alternative I can picture just doesnt cut the mustard IMO.
If you're convinced I'm wrong, then I'd appreciate it if you could provide an example of a social network that you think could withstand the collapse.
kochevnik
I forgot about this one - I just can't let it go without commenting because it see it so often :
"The lone survivalist, as bright as he might be, stands no chance."
I wish I had a dime for everytime I saw someone trot this one out. Don't take this the wrong way, Solsys - but it's the biggest bunch of total unadulterated crap preppers ever get fed.
What the people who say this REALLY mean, is that THEY can't figure out a way to survive. And they are absolutely correct. They can't.
But I'm not them. I'm me. And I am absolutely convinced that making it thru a bottleneck is eminently doable. It's going to require money, hard work, mad skillz and luck - but it is absolutely, positively doable.
That is NOT a guarantee BTW - it is a realistic assessment of how systems work - which also just happens to be something large corps pay me boatloads of money on a regular basis to undertake on their behalf.
People survive the most extraordinary things in the most extraordinary ways with just a little effort, preparation and luck.
Any bottleneck short of the sun going supernova is going to be a gateway some people (and certainly, almost all of them will be 'lone survivalists' of one sort or another) will slip thru.
That, I CAN pretty much guarantee.
kochevnik
Kochevnik - you and I agree on almost anything.
Kochevnik, I agree with many things you say, including the force multipliers. But the "robotic machinegun" approach you advocate contradicts it.
Lone survivalists may well survive indeed, but mainly because of their stealth and a form of nomadism. If you're dependent on force multipliers then you're static - and if you're static you will be attacked. In every stage of SHTF.
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