I have a lot of pretty crazy ideas, some of which turn out to be less crazy in hindsight. Often I try to follow them up by building prototypes and reading up on the subject to see if there is an invention or business opportunity waiting for me there. On a number of occasions my idea has proved to be following the Zeitgeist and others prove the idea has merit before I do, and often this is due to the level of funding and resources available to them. This is not my whining about how unlucky I have been, but I intend to start writing about some of these ideas here in the future. That way when I moan about this or that being 'my idea' :-) I can point back to a blog here to prove it.

So my areas of interest at the moment are:
3D printing. I know it is being touted as the next big thing for the consumer market, but my interest take me in a different direction.

A 3D printer has four essential elements, a machine that can move a print head in three planes (x,y, and z), a print head that deposits a material at any point, some software that takes a model and converts it into instructions for the printer and some software that allows a human to define that model.

The two target areas where innovation will take place are:

The print head.

Currently 3D print heads print in a single medium such as a plastic, starch based material or even metal. I believe a future development will be to increase the number of media that can be used by the printer. This could be achieved by having multiple, automatically replaceable print heads to embed different materials and elements into the model. This may be as simple as harder materials for an outer shell or generic electronic components that can be made to simulate different devices such as a FGPA type chip, and a print head to print the required circuit board in a material such as graphite infused plastic.
Another development may be to add post processing heads to the printer. Presently the printer makes a single x,y scan for each layer of a model being printed before progressing to the next layer in the z axis. The print head could quite easily be adapted to allow a post printing scan of the object to spray on colours or an external coating, to cut away areas where this could not be achieved during printing or drilling an adding fixings.
Multiple print heads could also be used to print elements of buildings. I have seen this is already being investigated, I feel that a loom based arrangement suspended above a printed building structure could also incorporate z oriented fibres into the materials as they are printed. Improvements in the print heads for this application would use dry concrete as the print medium, mixed with water at the tip of the print head rather than the current use of shotcrete.

The 3D modeling software

The current breed of 3D modelling software takes a lot of practice and training to use to make even the simplest models, I envisage a piece of software that allows you to create items from a pattern book of simple parts. Anyone can make a model out of lego. 3D modeling should be that easy. A standard set of virtual parts that can be snapped together in the software, but as this is a virtual model and not lego, the standard parts can then be modified, skinned and altered to make the desired model.

As a simpler way of printing consumer items, I envisage that models will be automatically translated into a set of parts like a kit that can be stuck together by the user once printed much like a plastic model kit. This would reduce the complexity of printing and reduce the print area required to make larger items.

I'll stop there for the moment and come back with my other ideas soon.

RenSMART has been running as a business for a while now and is now in profit !
I've decided that I shall no-longer be posting to this blog about RenSMART and will just use this as a place for random musings.

RenSMART's new blog can be found here: http://rensmart.blogspot.co.uk/

Typical Bank Holiday Weekend

Rain, grey skies and Eurovision. This weekends project was to decorate the living room. It has now become a major construction project. Shelves, a desk, new door surround, repainting and a new floor.

While looking at flooring I noticed that there is now a lot of bamboo options available. Half the price of oak and fast growing (so probably more sustainable). I think this is what we are going with.

Our holiday this year is sailing in the Ionian of the North Corfu around the faraway islands. The original plan was to travel there by train. Both for the adventure and to reduce our carbon footprint. Train through Albania and Greece proved too difficult to pre-book so we decided to take a ferry from Venice to Greece. Train tickets from Paris to Venice only become available 90 days before travel. When we attempted to book (89 days before travel) the return journey the tickets were sold out so now we are going by train and ferry and returning by ferry, air and train.

First Installation

Having waited and waited for an accepted quote to lead to an installation, finally it happened today. A solar PV installation. Now hurrying around to make sure that everything is in place for monitoring it's output live.

On 20th April, our first live monitored site was commissioned. Powis Hughes finally have a 6kW wind turbine up and running. The monitoring software has had a few issues but seems to be running nicely now. As I look at their RenSMART page now, I see that they have made about £90 so far. Only another 7 years to go and they will have their initial investment back.


Yesterday was spend uploading and annotating a couple of videos on how to use RenSMART Weather Data maps. You can find them on the RenSMART video page. They look good so I think I'll probably do a couple more.

Finally I have to look at going back to contracting for a while to get some funds. As Helen reminds me, I should not expect a profitable business after one months trading :-). That is why I am back blogging. It is my CV and agent avoidance plan :-)

Flying Start

Well RenSMART went live on 29th March as planned. There were the usual launch issues. Applications always misbehave when real people get their hands on them :-)

We are now half way through our second week. I've throttled back a little on the Google AdWords campaign and am concentrating in trying to raise our profile.

We are listed no younoodle (I did this quite a while ago) and have a reasonable score. We are aiming to be listed on the Telegraph 100 growth companies list



My initial concerns, that the Site Planner is to complicated for people to use does not seem to have been grounded. We received 10 quote requests in the first week, and a couple of calls about large commercial systems.

Today's big event was a call from a turbine manufacturer who was not happy. The turbine data for his product were all wrong. The data was updated and live within half an hour and as a result the term Indicative Price is being plastered all over the Site Planner.

Right. I'd better get back to it.

Take Off

The RenSMART Quote Request Service goes live on 29th March.

We have a good long list of installers signed up to give quotes and a good number of members waiting to request quotes.

Now I am looking for virtual canapés and champagne for our launch party :-)

JP has helped a lot with improving the database, I finally got the Sheeva plug working consistently as a data logger and the web server is running like a dream.

Role on Monday 29th

On the Launch pad. Ready to go

Finally the RenSMART Site Planner seems to be ready for launch. Not sure how people will take to it. It is quite an involved process. I am contemplating taking the underlying model and creating a simple front end for specific scenarios e.g. Domestic home installations or Commercial Small Office wind installation.

I have been running a small trial with a few friends and they seem to agree about the complexity issue (when it works).

Now I have forgotten what I was writing as Alex and Theo have brought me their pictures to see.

I finally got the response times down to under 5 seconds by removing all of the 'optimisation' features I had added to the server.

I have just run a sanity test of the Site Planner using an example from GreenBuilding magazine. The example was for a Solar PV installation in Cornwall. I replicated the system in the Site Planner and the yearly generation and system price were within 10% of actual values. Not bad.

Now to get the installers on board with quotes!