Abstract
Historically, open source agriculture (OSA) was based on grassroots technology generally manufactured by hand tools or with manual machining. The rise of distributed digital manufacturing provides an opportunity for much more rapid lateral scaling of open source appropriate technologies for agriculture. However, the most mature distributed manufacturing area is plastic, which has limited use for many OSA applications. To overcome this limitation with design, this study reports on of a completely 3D-printable planetary roller screw linear actuator. The device is designed as a parametric script-based computer aided design (CAD) package to allow for the easy adaption for a number of applications such as food processing at different scales. The planetary roller screw is fabricated in dishwasher-safe polyethylene terephthalate glycol (PETG) on an open source machine and tested using an open source testing platform to determine if it could maintain a constant load without slipping and the maximum force. Then, this output is compared to a direct screw press using the same materials. The results found that the maximum force is more than doubled for the roller screw actuator using the same materials, making them adequate for some food processing techniques. Future work is outlined to improve the performance and ease of assembly.
Highlights
Much open source agriculture (OSA) was grassroots technology [1] born of necessity [2], it is emerging as a commons-based [3] peer production [4], and some have even argued that open source agriculture is becoming a social movement [1,5]
Open source appropriate technology (OSAT) [11] consists of technologies that provide for sustainable development while being designed in the same fashion as free and open source software [12,13,14,15]
This study reports on the open-source design of a completely 3D printable planetary roller screw linear actuator
Summary
Published: 7 April 2021 much open source agriculture (OSA) was grassroots technology [1] born of necessity [2], it is emerging as a commons-based [3] peer production [4], and some have even argued that open source agriculture is becoming a social movement [1,5]. The MIT Media Lab Open Agriculture Initiative (OpenAg) believes that the precursor to a sustainable food system will be the creation of an open-source ecosystem of technologies that enable and promote transparency, networked experimentation, education, and hyperlocal production [6]. This distributed farming system is based on communication, sensing, data collection, and sharing as well as automation to enable a network effect or the Internet of Food and the agricultural revolution [7]. The open source model functions on a gift culture [16], where everyone benefits from generous
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