Category Archives: design
Portable Composting Toilets for Multi Day Events
The Cloacina Project with design and implementation from PNCA’s graduate students in Collaborative Design created an open source hardware platform for toilets, urinals, hand sinks and privacy screens for portable low cost dry toilets. Recognizing that hardware is only half the problem the PNCA students addressed the user interface by creating a training protocol, help [...]
Talk at Research Club this Sunday
Check out the video of Mat’s talk on why bathrooms are gross. Warning, it’s gross. We’re talking at noon on Sunday for our friends at Research Club. It’ll be their 19th Brunch and the first oen featuring composting toilets
Update: Note to Mathew, call people, don’t just google companies.
I recently had the chance to sit down with Brent from Hyphae Design Lab in person. Although they don’t say so on their website, they have extensive toilet experience and know exactly what they’re up to. I look forward to hearing more about the project. This could really set composting toilets back [...]
The Dream of the 60′s is Alive in Wolhusen
As part of the Cewas start up program Mathew and I had a chance on May 19th to visit Tropenhaus, a greenhouse for tropical plants located in the small town of Wolhusen, CH. The idea for the tropical house began with Johannes Heeb 11 years ago. The motivation was to re-use the waste heat from [...]
Eight Rungs on a Ladder of Citizen Participation
This is a chart from page 42 of Colin Ward’s book “Streetwork: the Exploding School” first published in 1973. the original reference is to Sherry Arnstein’s “A Ladder of Citizen Participation in the USA”, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, July 1969. Streetwork is a great book on environmental education. Nils Norman runs a [...]
Compost-heated Greenhouse c.1750
Ním Wunnan points us towards the Lost Gardens of Heligan, where they have restored to operation a “pineapple pit,” a compost-heated greenhouse in fashion in the mid-18th century for growing pineapples in Britain. It is, as far as is known, the world’s only operational pineapple pit.
Tuning the Aeration of our Pile
We’ve built a compost pile that is designed to be minimally turned and composted in a vessel, so we’re using a blower to get air in, and we need to tune the aeration rate. Our first problem running aeration tests is to measure the effective aeration of our system. As detailed below, the New Alchemy [...]
Greenhouse & Sensorhub up and running
Check out our data streaming in at cloacina.sensorhub.org explanations and images of the greenhouse and electronics will be forthcoming.
Help Protei! Autonomous, oil-sopping sailbots
This is fairly off topic, but I had to cross post from my personal blog.. Protei is a project I whole heartedly support, and provide tiny bits of advice too. Cesar Harada has put together an incredible team, and with a little money it is going to happen. “We are developing Protei : a low-cost [...]
