I recall predecessors to this idea from the 1970s, which probably implies I heard about them from Futurist Magazine and/or the book Small is Beautiful. It has always been suggested that engineers could do something worthwhile by inventing very simple yet useful things that could realistically be made in poor/underresourced countries or villages.
I like the idea behind this. I feel like far too often, the solutions we build for poor communities involve specific materials that can't be manufactured locally, so it just creates more dependence rather than self-sufficiency.
It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That way if something breaks, they have the skillset to fix it.
If you go to villages in developing nations, you'll see these kinds of innovative solutions all over - things that don't seem like they should work but they just do after lots of trial and error.
One product which I can still remember back from when Banana Republic was still an obscure and cool and independent company with a charming hand-illustrated catalog was pairs of slippers/shoes made in 3rd world countries where the sole was a repurposed worn-out bicycle tire.... Interesting inversion of the usual order of things.
it's very easy to verge into OLPC type thinking with this, you probably should just give them normal bikes instead of trying to come up with some bespoke DIY-able system
> It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That way if something breaks, they have the skillset to fix it.
Counterpoint: the bits of a bicycle that are likely to wear out or break are not the pipes that you can find just about anywhere, but difficult-to-make things like chains and bearings.
> If you go to villages in developing nations, you'll see these kinds of innovative solutions all over - ...
Years ago I remember reading an article about Russians making a living in the USSR. A man in a town wanted to mow his lawn but could not afford a mower (or maybe he could not easily obtain one?) His solution was a scavenged washing machine motor mounted to an old kids tricycle spinning a home made blade.
Making your own bicycle is a waste of time and energy. If you’re buying in bulk from China, you can get a bike for around a $20 per unit cost. I know that $20 is a lot of money in some parts of the world, but it would make far more sense to organize bulk purchases than to try to start up some kind of ersatz low quality bike industry.
I used to live in Thailand, and over the last 10 or so years it seems that the kind of DIY content you find on Youtube has had a positive effect. Before then it was difficult to find a building maintenance team that understood the purpose of a waste water P-Trap (unfortunately I'm not exaggerating)
Reminds me of https://www.opensourceecology.org/, but way more low tech. One could actually try the Open Source Low Tech designs without having a small fortune to spare or gathering a considerable community to cooperate.
I thought of this guy as well. I love the spirit of attempting to make open source farm machinery. I think that domain and ones like it are under addressed by open source in general. I think the guy who started it still makes content on youtube but much of it seems to be recordings of zoom webinars he does. Not really sure what the state of the project is
MIT's D-Lab https://d-lab.mit.edu/research does a lot of similar work on fuels/cooking, evaporative cooling, and design with locally available materials/techniques
See also Hugh Piggott's detailed recipe books for building wind turbines, e.g. https://scoraigwind.co.uk/all-of-the-books-by-hugh-how-to-ge... . They were originally printed paper books because they pre-date the internet, and have been popular, e.g. in Scottish island communities, for a long time. I see now they are available as paid eBooks, which seems reasonable to me because the price is very low and a lot of effort has gone into making them, but I wonder if that will be a problem nowadays with people expecting everything on the internet to be free.
That looks rather primitive. I wonder whether the difference between low-tech and high-tech isn’t simply an aesthetic one. If the designs were adapted so that they no longer looked as they’d been designed by an anarcho-primitivist, would we still regard them as low-tech at all?
Refrigerator would be a traditional root cellar such as my uncle had --- he was also fortunate to have a spring on his property which he encapsulated in a rock structure which was a wonderful place to be on a hot summer day/evening.
If you don't have AC but do have a refrigerator, you can build a DIY AC using a box, bottles of frozen water and a fan. There's YouTube tutorials on how to do it.
I have friends who use it in their apartment which doesn't have AC and doesn't allow installation of one.
Do the thermodynamics of that work out beyond a localized shift? (kitchen is hot, other room cool?)
I've always thought that refrigerators should be boxed in with air circulation where filtered intake air for the back comes from the basement and the then heated air is piped up to the attic to be vented.
Also lots and lots of manufacturing and repair work is like kept secret from the common people or at least that is the general vibe. So I'm happy for this initiative.
I liked the aircraft carrier analogy. Some skills can only be preserved by practicing them repeatedly, not by outsourcing them. AI is an incredible tool, but we probably need to be more intentional about which parts of the creative process we hand over.
Ages ago, I had Vol. 2, _The Metal Lathe_ which was one of the 7 vol. "Gingery Books", a series on _Build Your Own Metal Working Shop from Scrap_ (Vol. 1 was _The Charcoal Foundry_) which used as its central conceit the fact that a lathe is the one tool in a machine shop suited to easily replicating itself (insert old machinist joke about how you can make anything with a shaper, except money).
Always regretted giving my original away, the typewritten text and hand-drawings had a certain charm which the updated single leatherbound hardcover lack.
The Gingery Book Store is shutting down this year, and not reprinting any books, so one wonders what will replace it:
Another effort along these lines was the "Multimachine" which attempted to create a metal-working equivalent to the woodworking shop's ShopSmith using an engine block, taking advantage of the fact that they are readily and inexpensively available from junked vehicles. I believe it was on the "Opensource Ecology" site linked elsethread.
Perhaps Chris Borge's series of machine tools made with 3D printed shells filled with concrete and arrayed with hardware store components?
That said, as various machinists have joked, I am still "shaper curious", and have been sketching up a hand-operated shaper --- debating on saving for a set of castings, making my own, or going the hardware store route....
what is most interesting to me is gap between ai engineering and software engineering, a lot of challenges are testing , performance , architecture and user experience, good engineering still seems to be differentiator.
I love this project. I often lament how narrowly focused on tech/software open source tends to be. It is the most powerful example of human altruism that I can think of but it tends not to address a lot of peoples basic needs. I would love to see an open source house, car, bike, etc much more than I would like to see another solution for coordinating container clusters or something
(I know there are actually a few projects in the categories I mentioned but they are, largely, underwhelming)
My wife came across the Jean Pain compost water heater recently, and I've been really intrigued by the idea. I haven't found a great compact design though, and most of the information I see online treats it more like a fun project than something that could be iterated on and refined. Would love to find somewhere to trade ideas on this and potentially replace some or all of gas water heater.
I've been following this guy a couple of years now (as well as many other mentioned in the comments like LowTechMagazine, Simplifier, OSE, etc)
I always liked the WiFi catenaric (instead of parabollic) reflector for it's simplicity,though I think drawing parabolas shouldn't be that difficult either to get a more directional reflector
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 56.8 ms ] threadIt's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That way if something breaks, they have the skillset to fix it.
If you go to villages in developing nations, you'll see these kinds of innovative solutions all over - things that don't seem like they should work but they just do after lots of trial and error.
https://worldbicyclerelief.org/mechanics-of-mobility/
One product which I can still remember back from when Banana Republic was still an obscure and cool and independent company with a charming hand-illustrated catalog was pairs of slippers/shoes made in 3rd world countries where the sole was a repurposed worn-out bicycle tire.... Interesting inversion of the usual order of things.
Counterpoint: the bits of a bicycle that are likely to wear out or break are not the pipes that you can find just about anywhere, but difficult-to-make things like chains and bearings.
Years ago I remember reading an article about Russians making a living in the USSR. A man in a town wanted to mow his lawn but could not afford a mower (or maybe he could not easily obtain one?) His solution was a scavenged washing machine motor mounted to an old kids tricycle spinning a home made blade.
Edit: There is also https://pureselfmade.com/ which uses Piggott turbine designs.
Refrigerator would be a traditional root cellar such as my uncle had --- he was also fortunate to have a spring on his property which he encapsulated in a rock structure which was a wonderful place to be on a hot summer day/evening.
I have friends who use it in their apartment which doesn't have AC and doesn't allow installation of one.
I've always thought that refrigerators should be boxed in with air circulation where filtered intake air for the back comes from the basement and the then heated air is piped up to the attic to be vented.
Any usage, even minor, is at too great a cost.
Always regretted giving my original away, the typewritten text and hand-drawings had a certain charm which the updated single leatherbound hardcover lack.
The Gingery Book Store is shutting down this year, and not reprinting any books, so one wonders what will replace it:
https://forum.makerforums.info/t/google-post-by-marcus-wolsc...
Another effort along these lines was the "Multimachine" which attempted to create a metal-working equivalent to the woodworking shop's ShopSmith using an engine block, taking advantage of the fact that they are readily and inexpensively available from junked vehicles. I believe it was on the "Opensource Ecology" site linked elsethread.
Perhaps Chris Borge's series of machine tools made with 3D printed shells filled with concrete and arrayed with hardware store components?
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/13/3d-printed-milling-machine-i...
That said, as various machinists have joked, I am still "shaper curious", and have been sketching up a hand-operated shaper --- debating on saving for a set of castings, making my own, or going the hardware store route....
(I know there are actually a few projects in the categories I mentioned but they are, largely, underwhelming)
Here's a decent post about the idea: https://waldenlabs.com/compost-water-heaters-from-jean-pain/
Lots of really interesting tidbits, and a great lemonade recipe, among lots of other gems.
I always liked the WiFi catenaric (instead of parabollic) reflector for it's simplicity,though I think drawing parabolas shouldn't be that difficult either to get a more directional reflector
https://opensourcelowtech.org/wifidish.html