Since we don't have a venue or a speaker for our regular Advanced topics meeting, I am informally scheduling a discussion of Server Sky at the Northwest Lucky Lab Beer Hall at 1945 NW Quimby at 700pm. I haven't made any formal arrangements with them, or secured the meeting room, so we will probably end up gathering around one or two tables, with a few pictures on my laptop.
About Server Sky: I am working on the early stages of an idea that could result in a largish startup. See http://www.server-sky.com . It's a wiki, so I'm looking for positive contributions. The idea is an enormous array of satellites that are little more than a naked solar cell with processor chips, memory chips, and radio chips hung around the edge. These "server-sats" will be about 40 cm across, thinner than a sheet of paper, and weigh perhaps 30 grams. They can be launched in stacks of 33,000 , perhaps 4 stacks to a launch, and deployed in arrays. They turn solar power into computation and communication to the ground. Operating as a phased array, they can communicate with multiple small regions on the ground, more like cell phones than sat-phones. As outlandish as it sounds, it appears that a server-sat can be built and launched for less than $500 US (as part of a stack of 100,000 or so) , and pay for itself relative to ground based server farms through electricity and backhaul savings alone - each one saves about 100W of ground based power, and lots of infrastructure. Local (Washington County, Oregon, USA) businesses such as SolarWorld, Intel, Triquint, Maxim, Sharp, Merix, D.W. Fritz, and others could build just about everything but the rocket and the satellite container it is deployed from (Boeing?). Talents needed? Right now, coding, graphics, and the ability to read science, do math, and do web and library research. I can also use help naming things (engineering linguistics?) and writing up what we already know. When this gets slashdotted, we will need a community to answer questions. I need a little Mailman help to set up the mailing list (I forgot how). I can use a LOT of help designing the community so it can scale and create jobs and services for us, while remaining free and open. If this works, it will be too important to the world to make all the decisions in corporate back rooms. The idea is still in its infancy, but it is showing signs of surviving to adulthood. I want to crowd-source the conceptual design, and figure PLUG is a good place to start. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG-announce mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
