Archive
March 2022
42 articles
Unboxing Electric Surfboard
What’s the point of living on the water if you don’t take the time to enjoy it? Especially in a floating home like the SeaPod, you will have easy access to the sea for things like paddleboarding, kayaking, or swimming. For those who want to add a little bit of speed to their water activities,…
Cutting Steel Disks for TriPod frames
We have a steel disk that creates a bit of a flange on the bottom of each hub on our floating TriPod bases. The hub is what we call the center spar where the three outriggers are welded together. This “caps off” the bottom of the hub and helps seal everything up while giving us…
Preparing the Outer Spars
We have been making some strong progress on the second and third floating bases here at the factory. We are back with Grant to take a look at two of the outer spars that will eventually become part of those bases. These four-meter tall spars will be mounted to the end of the outriggers and…
Smart Tablet Design
All of the Ocean Builders homes will be fully-equipped smart homes so we wanted to have a functional yet aesthetically pleasing way to control everything no matter where you are in your home. While you will be able to access the home automation app from your smartphone, these tablets will be mounted in different parts…
EcoPod Engineering Room Layout
We are back with our Omer for an overview of the layout of the engineering room in the basement of the EcoPod. Omer designed this layout to fit all of the equipment that we will need to run the EcoPod. The ceiling in this basement is only 1.1 meters tall so everything had to be…
Recycling Sandblasting Material
Sandblasting is a very important part of our production process here at the Ocean Builders factory in the ever-humid Panama. Our steel develops a layer of surface rust pretty quickly so we have to remove that layer of corrosion so that when we apply our surface protectant, it will be applied directly to bare steel…
Self Connecting Platforms
One of the limiting factors of living on the water is that your space is much more limited on land. You don’t have a yard that your kids can play in or that you can host a party in because your “yard” is the ocean. While that is a limit in one aspect, it opens…
Aerial Tour of the Factory
We wanted to use our drone to show you around and give a bit of an aerial tour of the Ocean Builders factory so that you can see how things are laid out and better visualize what you see in the blog posts from the factory. Our factory is located in Linton Bay, Panama so…
Detailed Plans for EcoPod Layout for the Engineering Team
Here we have Grant giving us a pretty cool inside-look at something that hasn’t been shown to the public yet – the engineering CAD drawings and schematics for the EcoPod that our engineering team uses. This computer program allows us to look at each individual piece and move or hide them so that we can…
Variable Buoyancy and Ballast for Floating Pods and other Structures
One of the challenges with building a floating home is the need for variable buoyancy and adjustable ballast. On boats and ships, this process is fairly simple since it is basically just a matter of making the boat sit at the right level in the water. However, with a home, especially one sitting on a…
Admin Dashboard Development Overview
In this post, we will dive deeper into how the admin dashboard is being developed and how it is deployed using AWS services. We will also take a look at how the Brain Computer that is in each Pod communicates with our cloud servers as well as how past data can be seen by the…
Basement of EcoPod
Grant is back with another factory update from the Ocean Builders factory here in Panama. This is a cool one as we have been working on getting the EcoPod prototype put together. This has been the summation of about six weeks of work but things are coming along nicely. We ran into a few hiccups…
Ocean Builders Admin Dashboard First Look
Although it is still a work in progress and there are still many features to be added and polished, we are ready to share an early version of the Ocean Builders admin dashboard.The admin dashboard will allow Ocean Builders staff to oversee the status of the SeaPods and EcoPods that are deployed and will…
Rotating Pod
One of the cool ideas that we wanted to add to our homes is the ability to rotate the home automatically or manually in any direction that you would like. One of the drawbacks of traditional homes that are on land is that once that home is built, it’s not going to move. So if…
Underwater Room Windows!!!
We have spent the last two planning and designing an underwater room that would of course be beneath the surface of the water. One of the biggest challenges with doing anything underwater is dealing with the water pressure. As you get deeper, the water pressure quickly increases so having a robust structure is crucial.The best…
Installing Motors on SeaPod Push Boats
Grant is back at the factory with another update on our new-to-us workhorse boats that we will be using to push SeaPods on the TriPod base through the water. These boats will act like tugboats to help get the SeaPods to their correct locations since the SeaPod itself won’t have a drive system.One cool thing…
Bulletproof Pod
Here at Ocean Builders, we are creating something totally new that the world has never seen before. That means that along the way, we are constantly experimenting to see if there is a better method or a better option that we could use in our design. One of the ideas that we had was to…
Front Door Automation
Keeping with the theme of automating the simple tasks in the SeaPod, the front door will be able to easily be locked and unlocked through the SeaPod home automation app. We want coming home to be simple and easy so we made a system that will allow you to unlock your front door with the…
Drone Tour of where SeaPods will be placed
Here we have a short drone tour that shows where we will be deploying the first SeaPods here in Linton Bay, Panama. As you can see, this is a picturesque little corner of the world that we feel is a perfect place to live. From the deep blue water to the lush green mountains in…
End to End Testing Using Cypress Framework
Testing is an incredibly time-consuming but essential step that has to be done in order to deliver reliable software.Using modern tools for automated end-to-end testing helps to greatly reduce the amount of time the quality assurance team has to spend on repetitive tasks like checking the usual user flows. The time saved can be used…
Solar Array Layout
Here we have an overview of the solar panel array that will help power the SeaPod and EcoPod. This panel layout is 5m x 5m so we will have 25 square meters of solar panels collecting energy from the sun to power the home. By our calculations, under normal use, this should be able…
Balsa wood flooring
We have been doing some experimentation with some different materials to use as the flooring in the EcoPod. Our first tests were with a plastic honeycomb-like material that was strong and durable but isn’t very eco-friendly. While those tests were considered successful, we want to find a more eco-friendly material that we can use to…
Wall Mold for EcoPod
We are back at the factory with an update about some of the EcoPod molds. What you can see in the video below are basically the “bones” of the eventual mold for some of the EcoPod wall sections. This backbone structure will be used to support the molds and give them their shape.The next steps…
Sandblasting Metal Tubes
Grant has another factory update for us, this time about some of the sandblasting that we have been doing here at the Ocean Builders factory in Panama. We are working with steel, and the thing about steel is that especially in humid climates as we have here, it will develop a layer of surface rust…
CI/CD for the Admin Dashboard
Our software development team is always looking for ways to optimize the development process so we can focus more on coding new features and spend less time doing repetitive tasks that can be automated.As part of these efforts, we have been working in a smooth CI/CD (Continuous Integrations / Continuous Delivery) pipeline that automates all…
Follow me
The SeaPod, EcoPod, and EarthPod have so much technology packed into the small package that makes everyday life easier and more convenient. As with most technologically complex things, a smart home requires a bit of configuration and setting changes to adjust the home to have the settings that you want. While this is usually just…
Shower Controller
Here we have a CAD drawing showing the enclosure for the shower controller and the custom PCB board that will be used within it. The shower controller acts as the brain of the smart shower system and reads and relays information between the sensors, the home automation app which will run on a tablet in…
New Storage Containers
We recently took delivery of a new-to-us storage container here at the factory. We use containers like this for several different things but this one will be used as storage. These containers are great because they are designed to be stacked on ships when used for shipping, so that means that we can easily stack…
Workhorse Boats
Grant wanted to bring everyone another update from the factory about two boats that we have been renovating over the past few months. The company that was using the boats previously hadn’t used them for quite a while so they were salvaged and we picked them up.The restoration process over the past few months has…
Steel Edging
Grant is coming to you from the Ocean Builders factory here in Panama with another update on the steel tubes that we recently took delivery of. After getting everything unloaded, we began working on some of the prep that needs to be done to get these tubes ready for the next step.The steel is manufactured…
Salt Water Tank Updates
The SeaPod has a smart desalination system that will take saltwater from the sea and turn it into usable freshwater for the home. This system will operate with a holding tank for saltwater in the engineering room and Omer is here to give a demo of how everything will work.The saltwater tank will be where…
Preparing the Floating Spar
We have taken one more step towards getting the first completed SeaPod into the water. We have installed the “shelf” on the center spar of our first floating platform that will hold the weight of the actual home portion of the SeaPod. These brackets go around the center spar and create the main weight-bearing portion…
Poop Test
Omer is back to give us a live demonstration of how the poop separator, the incinerator, and the heat exchanger will work together to safely burn all of the solid waste from the toilet and capture the heat that is generated during the process. This will allow the SeaPod to safely and responsibly dispose of…
First Look at Gesture AI
Here we have a quick demonstration of the gesture AI that we will have as an option in the Ocean Builders homes. Gesture AI will use artificial intelligence to recognize simple gestures that will be used to control different actions within the home. This technology can be used for simple things around the house like…
Bed Presence Detector
One of the biggest challenges with the SeaPod is the energy capacity. The SeaPod will not be connected to the municipal power grid so any electricity that is needed to power the home will need to be generated by the home. Because of this, electricity is a very precious resource that we don’t want to…
Laying the EcoPod Flooring
We are back with another factory update from Grant. This update is about the flooring of the EcoPod. We have been working to install these floor panels over about eight hours to see how the fitment looks and how everything will work together. So far the results have been good.This was our second or third…
Rubber Connector Material
When dealing with different materials like fiberglass and steel, it is important to protect them from each other. In this particular matchup, the steel will basically always damage the fiberglass if they are connected with no other materials between them. In this case, the fiberglass spar will be installed over the steel spar so we…
Waste Water Treatment System
We have been spoiled quite a bit over the years of living in homes with running water. Most of us never worry about what happens with all of the wastewater in our homes because it either goes into a septic tank or back into the municipal sewer and waste system. That luxury is not something…
Kitchen Sink Controller
To fit the minimalistic look that we want to achieve in the SeaPod, we are going with a kitchen sink design that utilizes capacitive touch instead of the traditional knobs or handles that you will find in most homes. This presented a few different challenges that we had to overcome but luckily for us, Omer…
Changing Angle Dynamic Platforms
Here we have an interview with Grant discussing a fascinating new concept, changing angle dynamic platforms. These platforms, which would float on the water with the Seapods set around them, would add a dynamic and adaptable approach to connecting communities.A traditional platform works like a jetty, sitting on the surface of the water. Changing angle…
Wifi Switch for a low EMF Home
One of the byproducts of having a smart home with so many wireless devices is the presence of Electro-Magnetic Fields, better known as EMFs. Although you can’t see EMFs with your eyes, they practically surround us in the modern world and we wanted to have a way to limit your exposure while living in the…
Making of the bottom half of the SeaPod
Grant Romundt Construction
We are starting to make some real progress on the bottom half of the SeaPod outer shell. Grant is back at the factory to talk us through the plans for the process and what we will be working on for the next few weeks.He is standing at the side of the molds for the bottom…