Archive
May 2022
21 articles
Raising the Roof!
We are back at the factory with some very exciting news, the roof has been raised! We got the first SeaPod roof lifted and placed on the center spar where it will be mounted. This process took quite a bit of work and cooperation but we are in good shape now. The roof has a…
How to find the perfect match!
The steel tubes that we use to make the spars and outriggers begin their lives as a flat sheet of steel that is then rolled into a tube. This process gets things close but usually not perfect, so we have to go back and do a little work to get things where we need them…
Delivery Drone Build – 5 – Package Testing
So we know that the delivery drone will fly, but it needs to be able to carry and deliver packages to the destination. To make that happen, we are using an electromagnet that will secure the payload during flight. Electromagnets work by using electricity to magnetize themselves and can turn off the magnetization by turning…
Crash Test Dummy Pod
One of the challenges when working in the water is water pressure. Water pressure gets higher as you go deeper and can crush structures if they are not properly reinforced to sustain the pressure. Since we want to have the option of an underwater room, we need to be absolutely certain that the structure won’t…
How to make electronics last longer in harsh marine environments
The marine environment is extremely harsh for things like electronics, and with us building a smart home that will float in the ocean, corrosion is one of our biggest enemies. We need our homes to stand the test of time so one of our biggest ongoing priorities is to find ways to protect the electronics…
Inside the Super Bowl
Grant is back at the factory with an update about what he calls the Super Bowl. This is the underside of the SeaPod roof section. This is made up of 16 sections that go together like pieces of a pie to give us one solid roof.The molds will always have slight imperfections and while we…
Inside the SeaPod Central Hub
This is a quick little tour of the inside of the SeaPod central hub. This is the main point of contact where the three outriggers will meet in the middle as well as where the vertical central spar will be connected. This central hub will support all of the weight of the home so it…
Pod Door Production
The SeaPod door has been quite the journey thus far, but we finally have found a good footing and we are making progress toward having these doors in full production. Through vendor changes, design changes, and everything else that we have been battling, we think we have found what we are looking for. The default…
Delivery Drone Build – 4 – Live View & Software Integration with Delivery Control Center
Here we have a demonstration from Omer to show what the live view camera can see and also the “control center” for the custom-built delivery drone. This system is designed to fly autonomously and land and takeoff from the SeaPod or EcoPod home. To do this, the drone has to be able to see where…
Delivery Drone Build – 3 – First engine run & indoor flight testing
Here we have a quick video showing the first time that we fired up the motors on the drone and also the first indoor hover test for our custom-built delivery drone. After we got everything assembled and wired up, the next step is to turn it on and make sure that everything works and so…
Astro ASV announcement and update
Our original Manta project has taken a bit of a turn in a different direction, and we have been making good progress on it so far. The ASTRO(Autonomous Surface Transport & Recycling Operations) ASV(Autonomous Surface Vessel) has some pretty important differences from the original Manta idea.There are two main parts of the ASTRO name. The…
Delivery Drone Build (part 2) – Custom 3D printed parts, lidar distance sensors, installing motors, electronics, propellers
Here are some progress pictures of the construction of our custom-built delivery drone. We started with the main airframe and now we are moving into getting everything assembled and wired together. We are utilizing our 3D printing technology to make our own custom parts for the drone so that they fit the exact specifications that…
Delivery Drone Build (part 1) – Construction Started
One of our goals for the SeaPod and EcoPod was to have a system in place where we can make deliveries to and from the home in a quick, safe, and convenient manner. We determined that the best way to make that happen was with an aerial delivery drone that can fly from a…
SeaPod Air Conditioning
The SeaPods and EcoPods will be deployed primarily in warm, humid climates like you will find here in Linton Bay, Panama where our factory is. In order to combat the heat from the sun and keep things comfortable inside the home, we wanted to have an air conditioning system that could handle the climate control…
Drinkable Water System
The drinkable water system in the SeaPod is a complex system where the water goes through several steps. One of the biggest problems with desalination through reverse osmosis is that it strips the water of all of the minerals and leaves you with what is called “technical water” that doesn’t have the minerals that the…
Rolling & Lifting
The big metal tubes that we use for the construction of the central spar and the outriggers on our floating tripod base start out as a flat sheet of steel so they have to be rolled into a tube. We have this machine that does the rolling for us so that we can have a…
TriPod #2 Production
Back in August 2021, we launched the first floating TriPod base and it has been in the water since then. Now that we have seen how the first one has responded to being in the water and how everything has held up and we are ready to get the second one rolling.We recently got our…
Finishing the Roof
The crew is hard at work here at the factory working on putting the final touches on the first SeaPod roof. We make the roof upside down so the bottom is already complete, but we recently flipped it over for the first time and now it’s time to get the exterior surface polished and ready…
The Flippening
It’s time to flip the first SeaPod roof over to its normal position, an event that we are dubbing The Flippening. This task is challenging for several reasons and it took some teamwork to get it done, but in the end, we had a successful flip and learned some things to hopefully make the next…
Making Wall Sections
Grant is back at the factory with an update and demonstration of how we are building the wall sections for the EcoPod. These walls are sort of like a sandwich with layers of different materials that each have their own purpose.We start with a look at our molds. These start out as two halves, one…
Smart Pod User Interface – Possible Design
Grant Romundt Technology
Grant is back to give us a walkthrough of the new user interface for the Pod Companion app which will be used to control everything inside the SeaPod and EcoPod. The design that you see here is hopefully going to be pretty close to at least the launch version of the app. We want…