开云体育

Given that the terminology graduated to household usage surrounding the release of Windows 95 and the years of PnP failings that followed, it's understandable that the idea of plug-and-play, where the user is assumed to know little or nothing about the internal workings of a black box that "just works" every time, is kind of at odds with the Hacker Ethos [1] but there's a lot to be said for IJW as a design goal for any system... hacker-driven or otherwise.

Some infrastructure can easily (though optionally) come from inside a village: furniture, garbage incinerators, some vegetables [2], maybe even some clothes. However, by and large, infrastructure constructed within the village will be composite:

• sewers made from imported pipes
• networks built from imported electronics
• bicycles built from imported parts
• solar and wind setups built from imported panels, turbines, and batteries
• etc.
  

But I'm increasingly intrigued by plug-and-play options. For example, the MaxOak Bluetti EB240 is about 20% of a PowerWall 2:



A PowerWall is (arguably) not plug-and-play but this thing definitely is. In this form factor, it's restricted to uses like camping or mains backup. But I really like the idea of PnP architectures which scale up. This is sort of a USB Lithium battery pack on steroids. If it were modular, you could perhaps make a stack of these for a home's solar storage or electrical backup, with enough juice to power the fridge and a hotplate.

Whether power for a home or neighborhood is entirely off-grid, micro-grid, or fully on-grid with backups, it seems that there will never be a way around clean energy storage. The fewer the dials and knobs and inverters, the better the solution is, in my opinion.

Another, more hacker-friendly, example of PnP infra on a much (much) larger scale, is the Global Village Construction Set:



...their wiki is still active, so I assume the project is still going on. But I also imagine a middle ground between a hard-line "open hardware everything" and an a la carte model which invests in real machines or outsources to get the initial buildings and public infrastructure up and running (if it doesn't already exist in the chosen location). If someone settles on a location and buys some property, I'd rather see them up and running than swimming in molasses to adhere to a platonic ideal. I would consider the fortyfourforty cabin project to be "swimming in molasses" in this very sense, though 4440's nearly-arbitrary platonic ideal is basically "zero recurring costs".

On the scale of the home, the big issues are: (1) clean water (2) a place to poop and (3) energy. There are a number of drop-in solutions to water purification but digging or drilling a well is still always a task. As is water testing. Incinerating toilets are certainly a drop-in solution to waste but I doubt anyone would choose to go that route over a normal flush toilet, assuming there's enough space for a septic field.

I am curious if anyone knows of other plug-and-play and/or modular infrastructure components, big or small. If someone chooses to set up shop somewhere and finds they're struggling with one of these three main bits of infra, having a drop-in solution to bootstrap themselves is always handy.

Take care!
-steven

[1] It's my intention to lean on this terminology, as an expansion of the Hacker Ethic defined in Steven Levy's book "Hackers", in future posts. I'll try to describe the expansion soon.

[2] Is a carrot patch "infrastructure"? You decide.