Hallo! Johannes introduced myself so I don´t have much to do. :-)
As he wrote we are going to build a hackbus or better a hack truck. We are located in Leipzig, Germany but have also close relations to the Dresden Hackerspace. Our idea was to create a vehicle and visit bar camps in former sovet union states like kazakstan to share ideas and learn, because there are a lot of phantastic things going on over there. This was years ago long before we heard about the hackbus-project. When we learned about it we get a lot if inspirations and knew this is what we always wanted and happy to join the community. When we thought about hte project we had many goals in mind but realized soon it comes all back to the basic fact what we need is what we like to share: a "open" vihicle so everybody is able to modify or even copy it, just like software should be. So we needed a vihicle with simple and tough technology everybody can fix and can do this in bad conditions like somewhere far away at night during rain. We are thinking a hacker vehicle should be hackable by all means and not just a vehicle to transport tools and stuff. It should be a message itself, everybody can do this and it is not that much of work or expensive. Because our main destination will be the eastern countries we realized we need a vehicle with four wheel drive and able to drive long distances without refueling or service. Our first thought was to purchase a Mercedes Unimog but soon we realized it is too small, too fragile and way too expensive for most people to copy our project. We started to look for alternatives and soon found some pretty interesting busses and trucks from former eastern block. Vehicles from there are not famous for their good reputation but soon we learned it is a typical western stereotype and not true for those type of vehicles. Sure passenger cars was not a highlight of communist technology, but as soon as we looked deeper under the hood of eastern trucks we knew thats what we needed, simple and easy to fix tech, highly modifyable, cheap and highly available in general. After some time we also learned what genious design some of those trucks have, opposide what we expected. Pretty often they found very simple solutions for complicated problems. We in the west would solve those problems with a lot of high tech, expensive, fragile and hard to fix or replace. After checking out some vehicles we found the IFA W50 would be the vehicle of choice and started to looking for one. This was the workinghorse for economical and military use in former eastern Germany and many other communist countries. Opposide to the russian vehicles known to consume a lot of petrol the IFA just needs around 20 litres per 100km, as much as a bigger van needs. It is still in use today in many countries and known to be very reliable. Parts are cheap and easy to get, so we made our decision and bought one a few weeks ago. it is not pretty, perhaps, but exactely what we wanted. It is a former military tool car build in eastern germany for the Iraq airforce. They sold it by tenthousends to arab countries during the 70s and 80s and they are still in use over there, another point because spare parts are available in Africa and the Arab world, too. We have no plans to go there, yet, but perhaps we will do some day. Africa ist definately a place where a lot of things needs to be "hacked". Right now we are working on the car and will be done by the end of the winter. Technicaly it is in a very good condition but the paint needs some attention and of course the interior of the workshop. A million little things needs do be done but we are positive to finish it before the next spring. During the work on the vehicle we already started to think about solutions not just for us but also usefull to others. Especially ideas for the autonomous power supply is something we think can be used by many people not able to be connected to public power grid or for independend communication devices in countries with no or insufficent communication systems. This is my personal favorite and I am in this topic for more that 20 years now. My idea is a cheap and easy to build Darrieus-Rotor as a replacement for the quite expensive small windpower systems on the market. It should be enough to power communication devices, small computers or a refrigorator. Last one is also a project of us to build a cheap "open-source" refrigerator. Beside clean water cooling is a big problem in developing countries to keep food fresh because commerical fridges are too expensive. For us it is a great opportunity to work on those projects, first because we need it in our truck and second many other need it in their daily life. So the work on the truck gives us the possibility to work on those ideas. We have also some ideas for water filters without expensive materials to use but this is after we finished the car. We want to go step by step and not everything at once even if everything is very interesting and important. ;-) As I told before, the main purpose of the truck is to be a mobile workshop and we already have a lot of tools. Beside this it should be able to house at least two people for a longer time so we can go on tour with it and dont need nothing else. It should have some suitable communication devices like radio transmitter, packed radio if we are on long tours to be connected. For domestic use we already have a 3G-Internet connection and a WLAN-Hotspot for public use. One of our ideas is to park the car on public places, open the WLAN and set up a vpn-tunnel to a server in Russia. So people can use the internet without data retention or tapping of our officials and the russian officials dont know where is using it on our side. Of course it is not a anonymizing like tor does but it is a statement to show how easy it is to fool the survailance systems and hopefully they realize it has no sense to build more of it. Beside this it is great to show public and not hide like hackers mostly do. So even just parking the car can be a kind of a project. ;-) bye bye Alex 2011/8/21 das ende der nahrungskette <j...@monochrom.at>: > Hey folks! > > We had quite some time of radio silence on this list... mainly because we > were occupied getting our local Austrian hackbus project going. > > But now I would like to introduce you to our new mailing list member > Alexander Heidenreich <422...@googlemail.com>... he is currently organizing > a pretty awesome project in Eastern Germany. > A hackbus (former old Soviet vehicle, as far as I remember) that he plans to > take on tour to visit barcamps in Kazakhstan! > Alexander, do you want to give us some details? > > All the best > Johannes >
