Starting a new Company

RobertDyck · 2023-05-20 15:32:12

I've posted about this a few times, but would like to see if anyone here is able to seriously help. I would like to seek financing to start a company. Elon Musk said money was easy to get, every idiot could borrow money. But now that interest rates are raising above zero, companies have to actually earn income. That means they have to actually produce something useful to people. Really? So how do I get some of that?

I want to establish a company that has several divisions:

Manufacture high efficiency photovoltaic panels, using 8-junction gallium-indium-nitride
Build houses that are 100% energy independent. These would be designed for northern locations such as Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, etc, and Canada. Not like Elon's Solar City that builds equipment for Southern California. This is for northern locations that have actual winter... with snow. The roof wouldn't have just a few solar panels attached; the roof would *BE* all solar panel. The photovoltaic panels covered by a transparency that protects against snow, hail, etc. Photovoltaic cells mounted on a copper manifold using the same thermal compound as computers use to mount the heat sink to the CPU. Photovoltaic cells fail due to over heating, so this would prevent over heating. Obviously antifreeze in the water circulated in the manifold. A heat exchanger would pre-heat water to the hot water tank, so heat from the solar panels is not wasted. Geothermal heat pump. Helical windmills in the back yard, because helical works with gusting wind that changes direction from second to second. An area with buildings such as a suburb with houses and garages will have that. And helical does not kill birds. Batteries in the basement, but not lithium-ion batteries. Use deep-cycle batteries that are heavier but long life. Batteries in a vehicle must be light-weight, but batteries in a house do not have to be so light. Government regulations require any house that uses a geothermal heat pump as primary heat source, must have a backup heat source. So add a high efficiency fireplace. Some people claim there is no such thing, but there is. If you want to be technical, it's a high efficiency wood stove designed to look like a fireplace; but salesmen still call it a fireplace. Size the system so the house is 100% energy independent in worst case weather; the other 51 weeks per year it will produce a surplus sold to the grid. Electricity will flow one way only: from the house to the grid, never back. So the utility sends a cheque to the homeowner every month, never a bill. Or direct payment with email statement to avoid snail mail / paper. Of course the house would be well insulated, high efficiency appliances, and a ventilation air heat exchanger. Appliances designed for long life (multiple decades); they are available, they're just harder to find. Charger for a battery electric car would be an option.
Manufacture Aluminum-OxyNitride windows. Size for storefront windows. A local restaurant with a lounge had a stack of rocks stacked on the counter with numbers written on them. The manager said they were thrown through the window. Thieves stole all the booze from the bar. The owner had to pack all the booze in his car every night, and bring it back each morning. That restaurant now has security bars on the windows. But I thinking ALON windows for places prone to vandalism, looting, or theft. Jewellery stores should want them. Perhaps glass display cases for inside the store; again made of ALON instead of normal glass. The patent for ALON expired years ago; I checked. Sell for a lot less than the current military contractor. Perhaps design the windows to sustain a half-brick or softball size chunk of concrete or similar size river stone thrown by the arm of a well-muscled man. That's what was thrown through the restaurant window. Or stop a baseball bat or crowbar or metal garbage can swung like a bat. It wouldn't have to stop a .50 calibre bullet. Could that be achieved using magnesium-oxide instead of yttrium-oxide? Yttrium-oxide is used to control grain size when the transparent ceramic forms. A way to differentiate the commercial version from the military version.
Kits to convert used cars to battery electric. They would use in-wheel electric motors. That means one rotation of the motor produces one rotation of the wheel. One motor for each wheel means 4-wheel drive. No transmission, no drive shaft, no differential. The differential is electronic. Motors designed to be regenerative breaks. Use rare-earth magnets to reduce weight. Investigate carbon nanofibre windings to reduce weight further. Just buy the vehicle lithium-ion batteries; no need to compete in that arena. Design the kits for vehicle used as host for body kits. Customers who purchase body kits already are willing to customize a vehicle by replacing large parts. Get companies that produce body kits to advertise my power train kits in exchange for me promoting their body kits.
Manufacture a hearing aid that allows completely nerve deaf to hear, but no surgery. This is based on direct nerve induction. Just a couple metal pads taped to the skin. A device the size of a smartphone clipped to the belt. Give it BlueTooth so it can communicate with a smartphone as if it were a wireless headset. A couple styles available. One style would have the electrodes look like women's earrings clipped to her ear lobes, using BlueTooth to communicate with the controller that is designed to look like a broach. A patient who was born deaf would not be able to use this, but someone who requires a cochlear implant could use this instead. No surgery.
Develop an artificial womb. This would not be used for premature babies; it would be purpose built to gestate babies from In-Vitro Fertilization to birth. That means we don't have to interface directly with baby's blood. That makes it easier to design. Baby grows the amniotic sack, amniotic fluid, and umbilical cord. So artificial blood to replace mother's blood does not have to be perfect. Just enough to deliver oxygen and nutrients to the villi of the placenta.
Recycle plastic. Build facilities that use thermal depolymerization to convert plastic into oil and natural gas. If there's any oxygen in the chamber, the plastic will burn. But once all oxygen is gone, the process starts. 85% of the mass of the plastic is converted to oil and natural gas, the rest is lost. That's what powers the process. Obviously it takes heat to get it started, but once started it's self-sustaining. This has already been done, but currently companies just sell the oil and natural gas as fuel. I want a second part to each facility. While the oil and natural gas is still hot, pipe it directly into a plastic manufacturing facility. This could accept any plastic: straws, plastic coffee lids, plastic pop lids, plastic grocery bags, and other plastic currently collected for recycling. This would accept any plastic that's available, but produce an easy to make plastic that is in demand: eg polyethylene. Form the plastic into nurdles. Companies that injection-mould plastic parts accept beads, which are fed into a pot to melt them. The beads don't have to be perfectly shaped since they're melted anyway. So plastic is extruded like spaghetti and a knife cuts it into pieces. The result is small beads that fit into the hoppers of plastic moulding machines. Sell these nurdles as bulk plastic. The process to make plastic requires heat, so some of the natural gas will be burned for that. So more loss, but converting old plastic into new plastic is better than burying it or throwing into the ocean.

Raise money with this business. When enough capital is raised, then expand into space. Mine a metal Near Earth Asteroid for precious metals. Produce highly refined iron and nickel and cobalt as byproducts, suitable for construction in space. Mine the Moon for anorthite ore, smelt on the Moon to aluminum. Manufacture ALON windows on the Moon. Transport to Earth orbit. Lunar facility can be fully autonomous, supervised by remote operation. But the asteroid will be too far away, signal lag too long. So use AI to run mining equipment. Earth sends commands to the AI. Find a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid with ice that can be mined for rocket fuel and volatiles needed for the asteroid mining operation. Asteroid Don Quixote has a coma from ice, but it's in the main belt. Is there one closer to Earth? Use all this to build the Large Scale Colonization Ship.

kbd512 · 2023-05-20 17:51:07

RobertDyck,

I consider you a friend, I'm primarily involved in very large global businesses, as well as software startups, specifically supply chain management for numerous and varied companies that mass manufacture products people use in every day life (foodstuffs, beverages, pharmaceuticals, biomedical devices, steel and steel products, fashion and sporting apparel, consumer electronics like laptops and cell phones, and oil / gas drilling), so I'm going to give you some good advice that you are free to take onboard or ignore entirely.

This is not a realistic business plan for a startup. You list off technologies you're interested in pursuing, but they involve entirely different domains of science and business. Pick something you're most intensely interested in, and pursue that with laser-focus. Develop a business plan to do it better / faster / cheaper than your competitors, and then you will receive investment money to do that. Investors are not charitable organizations. They are in the business of making money. They will want to know what new dimension your company will bring to the marketplace, if funded by them.

To wit:
1. 8-junction photvoltaic panels
2. Closed-loop / self-powered homes
3. ALON windows
4. Battery-electronic cars
5. Cell-phone integrated hearing aids
6. Artificial womb technology
7. Plastics recycling
8. Off-world asteroid mining technologies

There is some technology overlap between these products, but truth be told even a very large company like General Electric has entirely different subordinate companies or divisions set up to make photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, gas turbines, and diesel ship / locomotive engines. For making biomedical devices and medical equipment, GE has yet another company set up to do that. Apart from the off-world mining / smelting, you haven't indicated what your company would do within the market space using these products that existing companies are not already doing within that market space. Basically, it's a bit like saying, "I want to make cool stuff", and then listing out some stuff you think is interesting / cool.

If you're actually interested in something specific from that list, then let's define how we're going to either undercut the competition or bring a new product to market. Think of it as business concept of operations refinement.

I'll provide a specific example, culled from the list of examples you provided as being of interest to you:

I'm interested in more practical and affordable electric cars that anyone who can afford most used cars could purchase for similar money. To that end, I think a new thermal battery technology is required, based upon abundant and affordable materials with near-global availability. I would like to use limestone as the thermal energy storage medium. Limestone is widely available in enormous quantities, at prices ranging between $10 USD and $55 USD per metric ton. This material remains infinitely recyclable and will not melt or otherwise degrade at the upper operating temperature range I intend to use, of 600C, because limestone melts around 825C. At 600C, 1 metric ton of limestone stores 153kWt of heat energy. A thermal power transfer fluid like supercritical CO2 can transform that thermal energy into mechanical energy using a stainless steel radiator system. The temperatures involved are roughly identical to the temperatures in a normal internal combustion engine's exhaust manifold, so all the current automotive exhaust manifold materials that work for doing that also work in my electric vehicle application.

This would require development of a stainless steel vacuum tank with an embedded stainless steel resistive heating element and powered limestone to store thermal energy from an electric grid to heat the limestone to 600C, a sCO2 power transfer system to transfer power using a stainless radiator that exchanges heat energy with the much colder atmosphere, and small sCO2 gas turbines that are driven by the heat in the limestone tank and sCO2 thermal power transfer fluid.

The primary materials used are automotive high-strength low-alloy (HSLA) steels and stainless steels. We deliberately forego increasing the use of more expensive / energy-intensive and environmentally damaging materials like Aluminum, Copper, and plastics wherever possible, in order to increase the ease with which the vehicle can be manufactured and recycled, as well as reducing maintenance costs. This is a drastically simplified electric passenger car design that uses a new battery technology to make EVs affordable to the masses and long-term maintainable and sustainable when production is scaled-up to the degree required to truly replace combustion engines.

The main selling points of this new electric vehicle technology are as follows:
1. Significant cost reduction to make the vehicle available to the average person. All materials and most individual components are much less expensive, so they can be made in quantity and widely distributed in a short period of time.
2. Apart from a very small sCO2 gas turbine and stainless steel vacuum thermos / radiator technology, it's otherwise based upon existing automotive manufacturing components and processes. All technology development remains within the realm of standard automotive engineering. No new science or materials are required.
3. Does not weigh more than existing EV designs, but uses much lower cost materials requiring minimal mining and processing, and all materials selected are mass-produced at a scale which requires no additional mining.
4. Complete replacement of large vehicle components can be done at nominal cost, because the overall design is so simple, relative to combustion engines or electronic cars, no exotic materials are used, and the parts tend to be monolithic pieces of single materials.
5. The use of advanced electronics and semi-conductor technology is almost nonexistent, so even if some components like the sCO2 gas turbine cost more money, that is immediately offset by the reduction of materials consumption in other areas, which tend to be both high-cost, limited-life, and/or low-reliability.

Any worthwhile new automotive technology development should be simple, elegant, affordable, maintainable and long-term sustainable. Our cars will be simpler and lower-cost than combustion engines or electronically-controlled machines powered by electro-chemical batteries, which is how they will ultimately replace both.

tahanson43206 · 2023-05-20 19:14:16

For RobertDyck re this interesting new topic ....

Your title for this new topic invites contributions such as the response you received from kbd512. I hope that other members may be inspired along similar lines to imagine a company they might create.

kbd512 wrote:

RobertDyck,
<snip>
If you're actually interested in something specific from that list, then let's define how we're going to either undercut the competition or bring a new product to market. Think of it as business concept of operations refinement.
I'll provide a specific example, culled from the list of examples you provided as being of interest to you:
I'm interested in more practical and affordable electric cars that anyone who can afford most used cars could purchase for similar money. To that end, I think a new thermal battery technology is required, based upon abundant and affordable materials with near-global availability. I would like to use limestone as the thermal energy storage medium. Limestone is widely available in enormous quantities, at prices ranging between $10 USD and $55 USD per metric ton. This material remains infinitely recyclable and will not melt or otherwise degrade at the upper operating temperature range I intend to use, of 600C, because limestone melts around 825C. At 600C, 1 metric ton of limestone stores 153kWt of heat energy. A thermal power transfer fluid like supercritical CO2 can transform that thermal energy into mechanical energy using a stainless steel radiator system. The temperatures involved are roughly identical to the temperatures in a normal internal combustion engine's exhaust manifold, so all the current automotive exhaust manifold materials that work for doing that also work in my electric vehicle application.
This would require development of a stainless steel vacuum tank with an embedded stainless steel resistive heating element and powered limestone to store thermal energy from an electric grid to heat the limestone to 600C, a sCO2 power transfer system to transfer power using a stainless radiator that exchanges heat energy with the much colder atmosphere, and small sCO2 gas turbines that are driven by the heat in the limestone tank and sCO2 thermal power transfer fluid.
The primary materials used are automotive high-strength low-alloy (HSLA) steels and stainless steels. We deliberately forego increasing the use of more expensive / energy-intensive and environmentally damaging materials like Aluminum, Copper, and plastics wherever possible, in order to increase the ease with which the vehicle can be manufactured and recycled, as well as reducing maintenance costs. This is a drastically simplified electric passenger car design that uses a new battery technology to make EVs affordable to the masses and long-term maintainable and sustainable when production is scaled-up to the degree required to truly replace combustion engines.
The main selling points of this new electric vehicle technology are as follows:
1. Significant cost reduction to make the vehicle available to the average person. All materials and most individual components are much less expensive, so they can be made in quantity and widely distributed in a short period of time.
2. Apart from a very small sCO2 gas turbine and stainless steel vacuum thermos / radiator technology, it's otherwise based upon existing automotive manufacturing components and processes. All technology development remains within the realm of standard automotive engineering. No new science or materials are required.
3. Does not weigh more than existing EV designs, but uses much lower cost materials requiring minimal mining and processing, and all materials selected are mass-produced at a scale which requires no additional mining.
4. Complete replacement of large vehicle components can be done at nominal cost, because the overall design is so simple, relative to combustion engines or electronic cars, no exotic materials are used, and the parts tend to be monolithic pieces of single materials.
5. The use of advanced electronics and semi-conductor technology is almost nonexistent, so even if some components like the sCO2 gas turbine cost more money, that is immediately offset by the reduction of materials consumption in other areas, which tend to be both high-cost, limited-life, and/or low-reliability.
Any worthwhile new automotive technology development should be simple, elegant, affordable, maintainable and long-term sustainable. Our cars will be simpler and lower-cost than combustion engines or electronically-controlled machines powered by electro-chemical batteries, which is how they will ultimately replace both.

For kbd512 re automobile concept .... If your concept were to come to pass, it seems to me the new electric vehicle charging stations going in everywhere might be able to re-heat the heat "battery" you have described. If you were to design your vehicle to use the charging systems developed for EV's, then you would be spared the expense of designing your own recharging system.

Any chance that an EV charging station could replenish the thermal energy in your vehicle?

(th)

RobertDyck · 2023-05-20 20:00:41

As Tom indicated, Brian's response is not helpful. When I was a teenager I expected to start small with one product, and grow. That should have started when I graduated university in 1984. Various people have been condescending and deliberately obstructive. This doesn't help. If the company starts with investment instead of solely my own money, then it doesn't have to start small, and doesn't have to focus on just one product. Creating a separate corporation for each product is for the purpose of limiting liability. That means you expect failure, and are placing "firewalls" so failure of business in one product line will not impact the rest of the company. It also means you don't intend to pay your debts; if failure occurs, you intend to walk away and screw your creditors. Rather than create corporate complication, one single corporation with multiple divisions is easier to manage, less management overhead, and easier to enable one division(s) to support others.

And Brian tries to distract by bringing in a new technology. I don't believe in his thermal battery technology. If he wants to do it, he can do so with his own business.

Brian mischaracterized some of my ideas. The hearing aid should not be called "cell-phone integrated". Although that's a feature, it's a minor one. Primarily it works by direct nerve induction. Most hearing aids just amplify sound. This doesn't. And it doesn't require surgery. It's direct nerve induction.

Cars: before Tesla was founded, I wanted to do the car thing. At that time hydrogen fuel cell technology was important. I had expected hydrogen would become a major thing. Ballard had one setback in a major test, and their investors abandoned them. It was something they could work through, but major auto-manufacturers abandoned Ballard. I could offer hydrogen fuel cell as an option, but there are so few hydrogen fuel stations right now that it isn't worth it.

These are things I have been talking about since 1999/2000. That's over 2 decades. If I don't do them, they won't get done. One company did produce a slick video about artificial wombs. If you understand the technology, they had a few major errors. That video was for the purpose of scamming investors, with no real intention to build anything.

So, if we all run around trying to do different things, then nothing will get done. Pull together or fail separately. Hang together or hang separately. We've been blather about this stuff for many years. I joined the first Mars Society forum in 1999. I did try to organize a major project, and we did pull together. We made major progress, but Dr Zubrin was afraid so refused to allow the project to be an official Mars Society project. Without that endorsement, several necessary supports fell away and the project died. Now we have far fewer people on this forum. I'm asking help to get my company started. Tom wants the Large Ship to happen in real life. This is the business plan to make it happen. Now can we work together?

kbd512 · 2023-05-20 20:54:38

tahanson43206,

Yes, it's entirely feasible to use any of the existing electric charging stations. You're dumping electricity through a resistive heating element rather than into batteries. There is no new technology development required on that front.

RobertDyck,

Regardless of how you choose to view my response, pursuing all of those technologies at the same time is tantamount to owning a very large aerospace, manufacturing, biomedical, and energy technology conglomerate like GE or Siemens. Nobody is going to hand over the many billion dollars to you to do what other companies are already doing successfully within the realm of what you're proposing to do. There are already a multitude of companies (with the possible exception of the artificial womb) that either make or are actively pursuing technology development along the lines of what you want to do, and their companies are already selling those products, so you need to define what it is that you intend to do differently that brings value-add to the existing market.

I brought up the electric car idea to provide a concrete example, not because I expect you're interested in pursuing it. I expressed what I thought was lacking in the EV space, without going into the not-so-minor detail that all the Lithium and Copper in the world is already spoken for and supplies of the metals are running short, so any new EV company coming along, wanting to do conversion kits for existing cars, is competing with Tesla and Ford and GM for battery manufacturing. I think you end up losing there because those well-established companies can offer a more complete solution that is more attractive to potential buyers. Anyone who has actually converted a vehicle to run on a power plant other than the one it was designed to use can attest to the time and expense required to complete the project, and that ever-after they're constantly tweaking the result.

You're nit-picking rather than addressing the larger and more generalized point I made. You could choose to fixate on details without distinction, or you could choose to address the over-arching point of picking a lane to drive forward within and pursuing it with a focus on what you intend to achieve.

Yes, I want your business to succeed, so my first question is who you think is going to fund something like what you're proposing, because any real investor who knows the market and does their homework is going to ask the same questions I've asked you. Do you have compelling responses ready?

If you want to fund, develop, and build a large ship, then pursue that, rather than all of these other side-ventures which could be very useful in their own right and provide a source of funding, but don't do the specific thing that you're interested in doing. You don't have another 20 to 30 years to build all of those other businesses to the point that they turn enough profit to pursue the large ship. They're enabling technologies, but artificial womb has very little to do with designing a large interplanetary transport. John Blincow has NSF / JPL / industry / academia funding for doing large space station development and his university workers are actively pursuing the manufacturing technology to create giant pressurized / habitable space stations. Talk to him about your idea.

RobertDyck · 2023-05-20 21:28:20

You overestimate the cost of starting the ventures I listed, and underestimate the cost of the large ship. And if I don't run the venture, they won't happen. Elon's ventures would never have happened without him. Government pushes the automotive industry for electric cars, but nothing happened. GM build the EV1 specifically to prove it wouldn't work. When customers were interested, GM sent the cars to a shredder.

tahanson43206 · 2023-05-20 21:35:18

For kbd512 re #5...

Thanks for noting the potential value of the existing and expected EV charging network. One potential of your proposal that seems to me to give your idea a significant advantage over the EV competition is the fact that high current charging will not shorten the life of your energy store.

It is possible you have done some scoping of the design issues for the vehicle. It's difficult for me to get a sense of the physical requirements of a system based upon your idea, so I'm hoping that images or perhaps even drawings become available.

Void has shown how drawings can enhance his presentation of otherwise difficult to visualize ideas.

Your idea of using the atmosphere as a heat sink would work especially well in northern latitudes and deep winter, which are challenging environments for your EV competition. On the other hand, a hot climate might be less attractive for your design, because all that stored thermal energy would combine with the existing hot air.

(th)

kbd512 · 2023-05-20 21:45:57

RobertDyck,

Cost is relative to what you intend to achieve. How much operating capital do you figure it will require to build a large interplanetary transport ship?

I've yet to see a business venture that produces hundreds of millions to billions of dollars operate on a shoestring budget.

Do you want any of these ventures to produce results you're satisfied with?

If so, then pick one you're most interested in and pursue it. You're going to need a lot of money to launch thousands of tons of weight into space.

Government produced the basic scientific investments that caused Lithium-ion batteries to become practical. Governments produced all the roads for any kind of car to drive on. Governments set emissions targets for vehicles to achieve. It's hard to assert that "nothing happened" when most, if not all, automotive companies are now producing some kind of EV.

GM built the EV1 to determine what was possible, then concluded that people didn't want subcompact cars with less than 100 miles of range that would cost a lot more than a combustion engine powered car which were far more practical to actually use in the 1990s, given the fact that they'd have to completely change and drastically expand the power delivery infrastructure, and create a bunch of other new technologies that didn't exist at the time.

While I worked at Dell, I spent my lunch breaks conversing with one of the engineers who worked on the EV1 project. His specialty was manufacturing robotics and automation. It was a fascinating conversation, at least to me. He expressed some of the viewpoints of both management and the engineers who worked on the car. The engineers wanted to keep working on the program, but it was very costly and GM had a very limited market to sell to when energy was much cheaper than it is today.

kbd512 · 2023-05-20 22:02:15

tahanson43206,

No degradation of the limestone battery from high current charging means fast-charging does no harm to the battery. This is certainly not the case with electro-chemical cells. Moreover, there's very little risk of uncontrolled combustion of the battery. The shape and size of the battery are application-independent. It does not require a specific form factor, nor are there thousands of components to hold to extreme tolerances.

A manufacturing defect in a Lithium-ion battery is the separator is too thin or has a tiny hole in it. Say we had a bad weld and the vacuum jacket around the limestone battery so it doesn't hold vacuum and thermally insulate the hot limestone as well. That's repairable and doesn't even require disassembly of the battery to fix. The use of large and simple components means unsophisticated fabrication methods work rather well. The complex / expensive parts are the stainless steel radiator and power turbine.

At the temperatures involved, ambient temperature provides a minor improvement or degradation of performance, but the temperature delta I used to determine thermal power storage is already well above atmospheric temperature, so what seems significant when gauging the performance of Lithium-ion or Lead-acid has very little effect on a thermal battery.

tahanson43206 · 2023-05-21 06:13:43

For kbd512 re#9

In a post earlier in this topic, you offered some good advice to RobertDyck about how to make a favorable impression on investors. You are going to need massive investment in order to manufacture and distribute your thermal battery vehicles.

You have provided hints in posts along the way that you have some skills with tools, so it is feasible for you to build a working model in your garage. Henry Ford is a good model for you, but there are many others who have taken what others considered an impossible or impractical idea and turned it into an industry.

You have at least three ** real ** engineers in the forum membership, and there may well be others who have not revealed their professional status.

The power train needs to be demonstrated, and you can build a water resistance tank to absorb power you generate. Your vehicle needs to achieve reliable repeatable performance equivalent to at least 100 miles per day, and you can do that in a garage sized work space.

You can provide reports of your progress, and the occasional image.

There is nothing holding you back that I can see.

(th)

SpaceNut · 2023-05-21 09:12:34

It was 2006 through 7 that I was unemployed and did turn to self-employment with many ideas as you have RobertDyck and Kbd512, only to come to a conclusion that I had to go back to work for someone.

I had 40 lighting / battery / charging projects to which I found many shortly after being marketed with in department stores by and far cheaper than I could buy the parts to make a prototype from the source nation of those key items.
Maybe it's time to revisit some of these....

The Items you have list RobertDyck has many end goals for whom might want or buy them.

edit update
here is the list and when I did the prospective content of design

Bus sign scheduel.txt    1.4 kB 1/7/07, 5:20:20PM
Chemical towelet light.txt 501 B 12/29/06, 9:38:20AM
Cigarette lighter White visible, red or IR LED light.txt 581 B 12/29/06, 9:41:00AM
Circular Flouresent light.txt    482 B 12/29/06, 9:54:22AM
Dead AA aaa C or D battery convertor.txt 1.0 kB 12/29/06, 9:42:36AM
Electric Referee Whistle.txt    381 B 12/29/06, 9:59:40AM
Electronic security Lock.txt    531 B 1/4/07, 6:41:48PM
Emergency LED Lighting.txt 857 B 12/29/06, 11:46:52AM
Emergency rescue device.txt 2.3 kB 12/29/06, 11:48:36AM
Fireman helmet flashers.txt 1.5 kB 1/30/07, 8:34:58AM
Flashing Crosswalk Guardian.txt 613 B 1/8/07, 3:29:24PM
Glow stick concepts.txt    5.5 kB 12/29/06, 8:23:30PM
Granny or GrandPa power.txt 972 B 12/29/06, 1:08:18PM
Hazard cone.txt 1.7 kB    6/5/07, 8:49:42PM
Heat recovery.txt    691 B 1/11/07, 6:20:56AM
House lighting needs.txt 961 B 12/29/06, 8:27:06PM
IR portable campers light.txt 452 B 12/29/06, 8:33:22PM
Lighting Terminology.htm 20.1 kB 12/15/07, 8:16:04PM
lightpyramid.jpg 79.4 kB 11/18/07, 6:36:12PM
Lite-Gloves.txt 783 B 2/26/07, 5:53:38AM
Mars Tic Tac Toe.txt 341 B 6/15/09, 9:57:46PM
Message Tie.txt 552 B 12/29/06, 8:37:56PM
Nicad (1.2V) to Alkiline (1.5V) battery convertor.txt 688 B 2/7/07, 1:24:34PM
No Hands Analog Clock.txt 359 B 2/8/07, 8:05:04PM
pedal power.doc 70.5 kB 12/29/06, 8:40:00PM
Pitching training game.txt 1.0 kB 6/3/07, 9:12:40AM
Programmable light socket on timer.txt 302 B 12/29/06, 8:41:38PM
Programmable solar light on timer.txt 476 B 12/29/06, 8:42:24PM
RED LED High LOW beam Flashlight.txt 327 B 7/20/07, 5:09:42PM
Scraper-Mate.txt 284 B 1/15/07, 7:51:18PM
security product.txt 1.7 kB 12/29/06, 8:43:30PM
Snowmobile trail gates.txt 1014 B 12/29/06, 8:44:28PM
Solar Powered Collectable car walkway lighting.txt 468 B 6/15/09, 9:55:12PM
Solar Powered Perimeter Security.txt 407 B 6/3/08, 9:13:52PM
Soldier Boot battery recharger.txt 1.6 kB 9/17/08, 10:40:48PM
The Cap Kart.htm 30.7 kB 9/24/08, 9:06:22AM
The DIY Segway.htm 26.8 kB 9/24/08, 9:06:56AM
Track Avoidance Detection System.txt 811 B 5/29/08, 10:45:40PM
universal flashlight project.txt 972 B 6/7/07, 11:22:04AM
Variable Voltage output crank recharger.txt 935 B 9/17/08, 9:32:56PM
Volleyball line hit.txt    583 B 9/17/08, 9:29:58PM
YoYo recharger.txt    387 B 1/30/07, 2:53:36PM

RobertDyck · 2023-05-21 09:26:26

Brian, you condescend and try to claim you "work with" some impressive sounding something. But you haven't said what you do. I have a friend who is a retired miner. He's an expert at mining but for the last 32 years has been part of a group trying to break into high finance. Some of his associates have impressive sounding credentials but they haven't landed a thing in all that time. They tried to broker business loans, and some of what they did sounds impressive, but they failed to land anything. For a little over a year now they have worked with one guy who claims to have money that will arrive " any day now". The projects include reopening a gold mine, profitable since gold prices have risen dramatically. And couple others. My friend is qualified because he's an expert miner. He asked me to be a director of his company and offered a salary. But the money will arrive in "just two or three days", and the same story for over 16 months now. Yea right, I'll believe it when the money arrives. So why should I believe your business contacts are any more credible?

kbd512 · 2023-05-21 12:00:15

RobertDyck,

You seem to take any advice or criticism and translate it directly into condescension. I said all 8 of these projects you want to work on are great ideas, worthy of further development, but I don't think one person is going to convince people to invest in all or even most of them simultaneously without first demonstrating success working on 1 of your 8 great ideas. My advice boils down to, "Pick a starting point you're most interested in pursuing." After that, I gave an example of a more practical way to enter into the electric car market, which is not attempting to compete in the luxury EV market that Tesla / VW / GM / Ford / others have wrapped up tighter than a drum, that was just an example, and never intended to change your mind about any given idea. If you think conversion kits are the way to go, then you can compete with companies like EV West that already offer conversion kits, conversion services, and electrical engineering services.

Tesla makes EVs, but they don't mine Lithium- never have and probably never will. There are tens of thousands of people involved in Lithium mining, or any kind of mining that produces enough Lithium to generate significant income. Tesla hasn't entered into the Lithium mining world because they're too busy making EVs, and they have to employ tens of thousands of people to do that. They spend billions of dollars per year on making those cars, engineering them to the nines, delivering them to customers, repairing them, etc. That said, the total global demand for Lithium grossly outstrips our ability to produce it. That's why a lot of people are slowly realizing that alternatives are required. I proposed one possible alternative, based on cost, because I know that purchase price and maintenance price sells cars.

I'm not asking you to believe or disbelieve anything about my credibility, or even the credibility of someone you personally know, I'm asking you to look at how Elon Musk made PayPal and then Tesla and then SpaceX so successful to begin with. Have you noticed that it's been about 15 to 20 years for each company to mature into what it is today? Did you notice that he didn't start each of those companies at the same time? He started with something he was intimately familiar with, namely software development for credit card processing, then he invested in EVs, and then he invested in making reusable rockets.

If you're asking why John Blincow, specifically, is more or less credible then someone else, I dunno. Maybe it's because he has NSF / JPL / academia money backing his latest project, maybe it's because this is the third or fourth project he's worked on for them, or maybe it directly relates to what you want to do. For all I know, despite all that, he's not credible. You should determine that for yourself by contacting him. If you think he's not credible, then ignore him and do your own thing. I'm not saying what he's attempting will succeed, but he at least has some kind of track record working on the kinds of space construction projects you're interested in doing, either for NASA or JPL.

FYI, I remain intensely interested in your large ship idea. I gave up on the very specific design you had in mind after determining that there were basic physics problems that you refused to address in a practical way. I like your idea, I even like the way it looks, but dammit man, gyroscopic precession associated with something that massive spinning in space is going to be tremendous. It can be counter-acted, but only by using a tremendous amount of power which could otherwise be used for other purposes, such as keeping everyone alive. That is why I proposed an alternative design that would not treat gyroscopic precession as if it wasn't real. Beyond that, I thought we needed a smaller demonstrator ship that held as many people as a single Starship could realistically hold if it was used solely as an Earth-to-orbit transport. Like so many other people with truly great ideas, you have a tendency to fixate on superficial appearances or the details of how some specific idea will look or function, without regard to physics and engineering. This is what prevents a lot of ideas from progressing beyond 3D models.

For my part, I just want the giant ship. I don't care what it looks like, who has their name on it, who gets credit for which idea, or any other changes required to make the ship work. I want the damn ship, Rob, not the idea of a ship, especially if it doesn't work. I already told you what problem you're going to encounter and why counter-rotation is required to stabilize something that massive. Believe it or don't believe it, but the physics of a gyroscope doesn't change either way. Get a physics professor you trust to tell you what I've already told you, then decide how important appearances are versus a practical ship design.

Calliban · 2023-05-21 12:55:26

I think Kbd512 raises valuable points. Starting from scratch and trying to develop several widely divergant technology projects will leave you overstretched. For every Elon Musk in this world, there are many thousands of tech startups that have collapsed and bankrupted their founders. Why not choose one technology concept in which you already have some specific ideas and are able to develop a prototype relatively quickly? Unless their founders were billionaires to begin with, all companies start small, with very few product lines allowing them to concentrate their expertise and resources. They start with easy wins in very specific product sets, make money and then diversify as they expand. Musk started out developing payment software. He was extremely rich when he took over Tesla and founded SpaceX. Success breeds success. You should also keep in mind that no matter how altruistic their intentions are made to sound, the primary motivation of all businessmen is profit and personal wealth. As you correctly noted at the start of this thread, the age of easy money is over. Interest rates are now over 5%. This is the kiss of death for speculative ventures that fail to produce goods returns on investment relatively quickly.

I think the limestone heat battery deserves its own thread. The concept is simple enough for a machinist with good welding capabilities to be able to produce a prototype in a home workshop. The downside is relatively poor energy efficiency. Only about one third of the electricity used to charge it will be converted to mechanical power at the wheels. For it to work as a mass motoring solution, power needs to be cheap.

Last edited by Calliban (2023-05-21 12:59:33)

kbd512 · 2023-05-21 13:14:50

tahanson43206,

I already have a different project in my garage- the plane I'm working on. When that project is done and fully documented, as it must be for DAR sign-off, then I can focus on the limestone battery EV. There are also other projects I'm throwing money at, namely the roof on my house. That has turned out to be far more expensive than I thought it would be. I don't have an infinite supply of time or money, so I have to pick and choose which projects to pursue. That was a large part of my point to RobertDyck. If the large ship is what he really wants to pursue, then since nobody else is doing that, perhaps that's more worthwhile than all those other side projects.

I will certainly try to find time and money for the alternative EV project, but it'll be done on a shoestring budget if it's done at all. After the automotive manufacturers fully realize and accept that there's not enough Lithium or Copper on the planet to make all our cars use Lithium-ion batteries and electric motors, then they'll start pursuing more practical alternatives because they're forced to do so to stay in business.

I would rather have an automotive engineer evaluate the idea for basic feasibility, to determine which parts he or she thinks are likely to be problematic, and then determine if other solutions are more practical. I'm not married to the ideas I have, because engineering is not a "till death do us part" proposition for me. I change my thinking with regularity if something isn't working as well as I thought it would. So long as I can still do that while maintaining focus on the end objective, I take no issue whatsoever with choosing different designs or materials or fabrication methods or even basic concept of operations. I think fixating on all those detail aspects of how something works is a waste of time and money. So long as it actually works, the aesthetics of how it works is largely irrelevant to me, because I'm not an artist.

Anyway, as I said, I think all of RobertDyck's ideas are worthy of pursuit, but I think success in business favors picking one of them to start working on, then seeing how much time he has left for other ventures. As someone who has worked in a startup software company, that alone is a full time job and then some. Devoting at least 60 hours per week was normative, and many days were spent working at least 12 hours per day, even on weekends. Sometimes I was telling other people what to do, but most of the time I was the one "doing the doing". On the last temp project I worked on, I spent at least 16 hours per day at my keyboard, hacking away, design / build / test / rinse / repeat. I can't imagine that engineering disciplines would be any different.

SpaceNut · 2023-05-21 15:08:44

Also, the ability to buy those things that you do not have is as much a part of the plan as to build the technology that is the one you are attempting to create. This is what was done with the electric vehicle and others that Musk has been doing.
Of course, when you have a commodity such as a rocket you must also have a customer that desires it as well.

tahanson43206 · 2023-05-26 06:10:38

Last night's .Net user group meeting featured a non-technical speaker on the subject of building a personal brand.

The modern age offers tools for building a personal brand that are far more powerful than those of earlier times.

A person wanting to build a company is going to need to build a persuasive personal brand to win support of investors, partners and employees and contractors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi1BigAOuDk

12 views Streamed live 14 hours ago
If you have an online presence, you have a personal brand. Most of us didn't intend to create a brand when we made our first websites and social media profiles. They were just fun ways to share our lives meet people. Now, they're networking and career growth tools. In this talk, you'll hear about people whose brands helped them become respected developers, managers, and community leaders. You'll learn how to use your online presence to advance your career. You'll also pick up best practices, common mistakes, and tips for balancing professional and personal content. Intentional personal branding opens the door to endless opportunities. Come see how to make that happen!
Cassandra Faris
Cassandra Faris is passionate about the human side of technology. She is the Community Manager for Kasten by Veeam, a Kubernetes data management platform. Her career has focused on supporting tech professionals through training, community outreach, open source, marketing, hiring, mentoring, and employee engagement. She is an international speaker who specializes in teaching people how to communicate, be more inclusive team members, advance their careers, and take care of their mental health. She is President of the Stir Scholarship for women pursuing technology degrees and President Emeritus of the DogFoodCon tech conference. She has an MBA in Organizational Leadership. When she's not busy with the tech community, she is an avid tabletop gamer, corgi mom, and soccer fan who travels as much as possible.

(th)

RobertDyck · 2024-05-20 19:19:22

I'm still interested in this. It doesn't have to be one single company. To start, the first two can be a separate company. Just high efficiency photovoltaic, intended to enable energy independent homes. Building homes without the new photovoltaic cells will not work, because existing photovoltaic just sucks. Spin-offs to produce photovoltaics for other purposes will have to wait, this company will be laser focused on building houses.

kbd512 · 2024-05-21 18:01:10

Rob,

One area of research that might yield saleable products or intellectual property is reducing the effects of the aging mechanisms that make Silicon-based photovoltaics degrade. Micro-cracking of the Silicon substrate and/or junction coatings from thermal expansion / contraction, combined with UV light damage, limit the useful service life of photovoltaics to 30 or 35 years at most. If someone invented a self-repairing photovoltaic cell that doubled the average useful service life, they would likely become much more attractive power delivery solutions. Developing said "long life tech" might prove easier and more profitable than more ambitious projects. Testing individual materials should be less expensive than developing the equipment for in-house photovoltaics production.

kbd512 · 2024-05-21 21:14:14

Rob,

If you haven't already seen this paper, it suggests that 8 junctions is at or near to the practical upper limit:

Practical limits of multijunction solar cells

Maybe it'll give you some ideas for which parts of the spectrum, due to the ease of obtaining or manufacturing the materials required, are most worthwhile for converting into electricity. For non-concentrator cells, 60% efficiency appears to be the practical limit. For concentrator cells, 85%. I do wonder if it's possible to use special reflective properties of the substrate or coatings to implement side-by-side, rather than vertically stacked junctions, and how that might make 8-junction cells far more practical to fabricate.

RobertDyck · 2024-05-21 21:18:19

Well, it was a mistake to post here again. You don't get it. If something is already invented, I can't invent it. If something is already on the market, I can't introduce it. The attitude that "if hasn't already been done then it can't be done" is incompatible with progress.

Silicon photovoltaics will never produce enough power to make a home energy independent. Never. Period. Single detached houses in a city only have roof area available. As long as photovoltaic panels require a quarter acre or more, it will never work. I'm interested in houses where I live, not Texas. Here we have actual winter. Heating in winter is required, not optional. We get multiple cold snaps each winter, each lasts about 2 weeks. During a cold snap the daytime high is at or below -20°C (-4°F). Overnight low is often below -30°C (-22°F) and rarely the extreme low gets down to -40° (both C and F). If you fall asleep in that cold, you die. I have worked out the heat load necessary to heat a modern well insulated house under those conditions. There's software to crunch the numbers for you. A ground source heat pump can reduce power required, but to produce that power with only solar panels on the roof of a house and garage, there's no way silicon can produce enough. The high efficiency panels I'm talking about are not my invention, a US government.lab came up with it and was tested at UC Berkeley. It's not fantasy, it's just a matter of getting off your fat ass and doing it!!!

If you can't handle anything new then you don't belong in the business of evaluating startups.

::Edit:: I saw you second post. The cells I'm talking about were published in the journal Science in year 2000. UC Berkeley built a prototype to prove it works. It's 56% efficient with 2 junctions, 64% efficient with 3 junctions. A theoretical calculation said 72% efficient with 36 junctions. Another researcher calculated optimal configuration for 2,3,4,5,6,7, and 8 junctions. He confirmed efficiency UC Berkeley produced for 2 and 3 junctions. With 8 he calculated 70.2% efficiency. This tells me more than 8 junctions is not worth it. A 70% efficient panel can make a home energy independent.

Winnipeg has an exceptional high number of sunny days in winter. That's necessary for photovoltaics. Yes, a means to automatically sweep snow off is necessary. Windshield wipers are hardly cutting edge. Vertical axis windmills can augment power production. When the sky is clear, there's little or no wind. When it's overcast, it's usually windy. One produces when the other doesn't. And vertical axis windmills don't kill birds.

Concentrators don't work when light is the slightest diffuse. A flat photovoltaic panel will still produce power when it's overcast, making use of what light does get through.

Last edited by RobertDyck (2024-05-21 21:37:42)

kbd512 · 2024-05-22 08:54:24

Rob,

Have you ever seen or heard of anyone inventing horizontal junctions, rather than vertical junctions?

That was my suggestion in the second post. I've never seen such a thing. It's fundamentally "new" to the realm of photovoltaics.

SpaceNut · 2024-05-22 17:11:11

current solar works with layers
Creating-Multi-Junction-Solar-Cells-from-Off-the-Shelf-Components.jpg

with multi-layer looking more like this

tuned multi-layer to gather more wave lengths

SpaceNut · 2024-05-22 17:15:53

tahanson43206 wrote:

For RobertDyck re Starting a New Company...
The purpose of this post is to encourage you to continue developing business concepts.
I'd like to see you succeed with at least one of them. I have several failures under my belt, and figure I have several more before success arrives, if it ever does.
Starting a new business is not for the faint of heart, and having the ability to take critical evaluation is vital.
There are two basic elements needed (and there may be more but I'm going to concentrate on two) ....
You need a product and you need a market.
You have demonstrated the ability make a variety of beverages and other food relates items. This appears (to me at least) to be a strength that might be tapped.
The market for beverages and foods is reasonably well established. It ** is ** competitive, without a doubt, but small local brands can grow.
This Universe seems to offer plenty of opportunity.
You have a potential product in Large Ship, and it is understandably on pause because the immensity of the challenge has become apparent.
A less ambitious goal might have a better chance of near term success.
This post is intended to encourage you to continue running ideas up the flagpole, and your ability to take criticism with good grace will be tested.
(th)

I am also going to say that you need to know what that market its willing to pay for a similar or comparable item and have a good idea of the profit margin that it might yield. You must also know how to get the item to the buying market for the least amount of cost as well.

tahanson43206 · 2024-05-22 17:44:24

For SpaceNut .... when you get around to starting a business, and I hope you do !!!! ... you will probably discover that when you start out you have no idea what your prospective customers are willing to pay for your product, unless it is just a duplicate of something already on the market.

Furthermore, when you start out you are NOT going to know how much it is going to cost to design, manufacture, certify and package the product.

My advice is to try to have a market in mind before you start, and then go through the learning process to find a point of profitability.

All you know when you start out is that you want to make a profit, but you will have very little idea how to achieve that objective.

If you are an experienced entrepreneur, you may have experience that lets you make reasonable estimates, but in the end, it is dealing with the day-to-day challenges, and snapping up opportunities when they show up unexpectedly that will enable you to achieve a positive cash flow.

(th)

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