SMS-CB Standards

Please take a hint from vodafone about the standards we will have to achieve:
FCC’s Consumer Factsheet
FEMA’s CMAS 
NOAA’s CMAS 
CTIA – The Wireless Association®’s WEA 
Examples future applications of SUNBOX technology  

Anticipated milestones upon receipt of funding

• +12 weeks - Generating enough electrical power to power ARM-based datacenter using solar panels should be achieved within 3 months of project start. This should include a prototype integrated circuit, large capacitors, rack, generator control system,  software, documentation and everything necessarily

• +18 weeks - The project should be powering an SMS antenna and notifying an administrative number of power status periodically.

• +24 weeks - The project should be filtering water, generating power and SMS messages in a manner fully compliant with military telemetry systems and with a fault tolerance testing and software bug fixing stages.

• +28 weeks - Project shall be completed and up for industry consideration.

Thoughts & Considerations

The SUNBOX 

• Modular design makes maintenance a snap. Simply put in a new SUNBOX or WATERBOX and take the old one to a service center to be maintained.

• Capacitive design makes the SUNBOX highly fault tolerant and scalable. An individual module simply quietly shuts down if insufficient electrical capacity is remaining and resumes as soon as power is restored.

• Water treatment should be easily integrated into any water source meeting design specifications for the liquid chemistry of treatment. This should include biomatter typically found in fresh water sources, but expandable to include salt water sources as well.

• SUNBOX containers are expected to be extremely low maintenance and require no maintenance beyond the product lifecycle of the rackmounted servers that they contain. 

• CAPBOX is an exploratory concept for an additional ISO container that contains no actual generation equipment but safely ensures electrical capacity for the SUNBOX during periods of low sunlight, such as overnight. A combination of SUNBOX, CAPBOX and WATERBOX products should be considered in combination for municipal production needs.

• WATERBOX water treatment containers are expected to have a higher maintenance cycle than SUNBOX containers. WATERBOX containers must be emptied periodically of biomatter and phosphorous compounds at a separate facility and have their filters cleaned or replaced at the end of their product life cycle. This should be the extent of the maintenance required for WATERBOX operation.

• The research target site shall consist of a secure perimeter with chain link fencing, remote CCTV equipment provided outsource or academic institution, room for at least one SUNBOX and WATERBOX, approximately 1000 square feet for solar panel generators, and approximately 50 square feet with 50 feet of vertical clearance for an SMS-CB capable antenna, and approximately 500 square feet with 10 feet of vertical clearance for ISO containers with hosing and gas connectivity. 

• A milestone for the research target site to achieve shall be complete independence from external power sources, with the capability of sending SMS messages about power status to a predefined number.

• A future vision for the project is a television broadcast sent over wireless broadband broadcast, but only if sufficient electrical wattage and capacitance can be demonstrated.

Fault Tolerance

Nicholas Hall, the starter of the SUNBOX project, wants to discuss fault tolerance design with you.

In an embedded system, the voltage being supplied to the integrated circuit may be measured and used as feedback for an embedded program.

Behavior of this program may be driven according to rules that do not depend on state, allowing an integrated circuit to be designed that can have rapid fluctuations in power but still sequentially execute a program.

Please observe this lowpass filter circuit.



If execution of the program is stateless, your only state is your program counter. The absolute worst case, even if you had no capacitative ability in your circuit, is that you lose your position in your program. Using a very simple capacitative design, a program may be designed that ensures it will not run unless it has sufficient capacitance to save the program counter.

This allows a circuit to be designed that is fault tolerant enough to run low-powered programs using only a very large capacitor and somewhat faulty and unreliable electrical generator.

This design can be generalized to suit almost any application with a desired predefined halting condition that does not depend on state or can shut down cleanly without power.

Messaging System

Q: What standards must we comply to?

A: In addition to providing standard SMS-CB broadcast capability, the SUNBOX should also support a standard military public key infrastructure such as X.509

It is acceptable to integrate a messaging system such as Lightweight Communications and Marshalling to fulfill this requirement.

Trustees

There shall be four "trustees" for this project.

• An individual technology leader with interest in fostering academic growth and development from the energy industry.

• An individual technology leader with interest in fostering academic growth and development from the water treatment industry.

• Nicholas Hall, representing a person with interest in fostering academic growth and development in the green energy, water treatment and emergency medical services industries.

• An academic fellow with a background in information technology and SMS-CB cell tower management.

• An academic fellow with a background in civil engineering, preferably electrical generation and water treatment plant management.

These four trustees will form the stakeholders that have the will have the final say on any dispute in the project.

Day to day operation of the project shall be conducted by all stakeholders. These stakeholders shall include the five trustees enumerated above and the students. 

The students shall be divided into three teams, each with 3-5 members, but totaling no less than 10 members. 

We shall now outline the student teams.

Software Team

• 2-3 senior student showing aptitude for C or C++, embedded device programming, and build management. Interest in inorganic chemistry preferred. TCP/IP or socket programming experience on a posix operating system a plus.

• 2-3 senior students showing aptitude for information technology, such as rackmounted server design, posix embedded operating system operation, deployment, cooling, maintenance and life cycle.

• A junior student showing an aptitude for quality assurance or traceability. Fine analytical skills and experience with test driven development are a must. C or C++ experience preferred.

• A documentation engineer willing to take responsibility for uniformity of documentation, proofreading and sound consistency of instructions, readability, communicability and viability of all documents produced.

Engineering Team

• 2-3 graduate students with interest in low-power liquid engineering applications and municipal engineering applications. An engineering student with experience or interest in building biofuel reactors, home water purifiers or treatment equipment may also be acceptable.

• 2-3 graduate electrical engineering students with experience using large capacitor circuits, solar panel based generation, and integrated circuit design. A graduate student with these research interests may also be acceptable. 

• 2-3 graduate telecommunications engineering student with experience in SMS-CB construction, FCC compliance and fault tolerance.

Administration Team:

• This shall consist of a single person from a business administration school or background or similar interest and Nicholas Hall.

All team members must attend the monthly stakeholder meeting at their academic institution, show up on time, and provide a summary of what they did that month. 

Nicholas Hall will try to do a weekly Skype chat with each member and shall consider unresponsiveness via email exceeding more than two weeks grounds for dismissal from the project.

Nicholas Hall will take a photograph of each stakeholder meeting and post it on this blog along with the minutes each time it is performed.

Primary User Story

"SUNBOX" 

Prototype for a modular solar powered generator, SMS CB antenna, datacenter and portable water treatment facility

This project is for a modular data center that runs off of solar power and powers a single cell broadcast antenna. 

• Nicholas Hall is a 30 year old venture capitalist and software engineer from Los Angeles, CA

• Nicholas Hall has been performing R&D on integrated data centers and power generation for several years alongside health research initiatives.

• This kickstarter project is for a single prototype that will integrate telemetry for this datacenter into a well-known telemetry standard used by the US military.

• GIT shall be used for all of its source control.

• The project should include broad representation from academia and industry and be organized into teams with clear responsibilities.

• We are looking for approximately 2 industry leaders willing to commit and 2 academic leaders willing to commit, and about 10-15 students, to be clarified with feedback.

• Each member should commit to contributing a certain amount of time. There will be a monthly stakeholder meeting at an academic institution and the project is expected to take approximately two semesters.

What We Need & What You Get

What we need:

• Two custom ISO containers, each about $2000.

• About $5,000 in gas hosing and liquid cooling equipment, including liquid coolant for cooling the datacenter ISO

• About $2,000 in rackmounted server equipment.

• About $3,000 for an antennae.

• About $10,000 in OEM solar generator equipment.

• About $6,000 to rent space to work on it. Alternatively, this may be donated.

• About $10,000 in water treatment and storage equipment for use in demonstrating acceptable pressure from the ISO containers water purifier.

What you get:

• Exclusive access to investment materials upon success.

• Day-by-day updates and documentation of our work, including pictures of the team and their participation.

• Free access to our mailing list, including periodic promotions such as free t-shirts and other swag.

• Your name as a contributor in our prototype development materials.

• Peace of mind working in a purely green solar electric project.

• Your picture on our blog.

• Your name as corporate sponsor, contributor or fellow.

Nicholas Hall will provide:

• Free secure hosting of all source code and design documents through a public GIT server at his own expense.

• Time administrating and coordinating.

• C++ unit tests

• Integrated circuit design acceptance criteria 

• Water pressure and quality design acceptance criteria

• A custom C++ build system,that uses only GNU make  and is suitable for targeting a number of embedded problems.

• IT expertise with the Linux operating system for embedded devices.

• Embedded expertise in low power ARM chipset and embedded device behavior with respect to the Linux operating system. Industry and academic participants may be free to choose another standard.

Industry shall provide:

• Criteria for a design document that adheres to biomedical device industry standards of traceability .

• Criteria for a design document that adheres to standards of Southern California Edison and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power energy production.

• Criteria for drinking water that adheres to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power tap water standards.

The students shall provide the following documents:

• 1 guide to constructing a datacenter contained in ISO container that runs on solar power and can output standard industrial voltages.

• 1 guide to constructing a water treatment apparatus contained in an ISO container that runs on standard industrial voltages.

• 1 guide to the software installation on both facilities.

The students shall provide the following source code deliverables:

• 1 deliverable consisting of water purifier embedded device source code, binary, GIT commit ID, accompanied by a document outlining the update procedure.

• 1 deliverable consisting of solar electrical generator device source code, binary, GIT Commit ID, accompanied by a document outlining the update procedure.

• 1 deliverable consisting of a rackmounted server physical dimensions and hardware specification, a document outlining its OS deployment procedure and setup. Alternatively, this document may be created by Nicholas Hall if no students are interested. 

• 1 deliverable consisting of a manual detailing how to maintain both ISO container devices and expected behavioral operation under basic malfunction and low sunlight conditions

All documents must be stored in GIT and all source-code must be stored in GIT. All sponsors and fellows will have read access to the source code repository. Source code ownership shall be determined by the stakeholders but is expected to be open source.

Nicholas Hall is expected to take full responsibility for the project and ensuring sufficient participation occurs to get it executed.

The Impact

You could change the world by giving it solar powered water filtration.

• This project intends to expand itself to ensure that its design is modular, so that other power generation sources can be quickly integrated such as wind, geothermal, nuclear, or even carbon. The design does not constrain this.

• Nicholas Hall is an activist for polio eradication and a volunteer public researcher for food safety disease control. He has anticipated such problems as the anthrax CDC incident and participated in activist journalism with regards to California's water shortage since 2011.

• This project intends to reach out to a nearby university or community college and industries and staff itself using a mixture of industry professionals and college students who show particular aptitude for bringing the project to its completion.

Risks & Challenges

• A low-power server rack that can still provide SMS text message service to be considered a viable alternative to a fossil fuel energy site is necessary. Voice capacity is not a requirement for this round, just SMS capability.

• It may be sufficient to simply demonstrate that the technology for this antenna can scale with more ISO containers, even if a single ISO container does not meet the same standard as municipal production. For this reason, design acceptance criteria should take into consideration that the containers may be used in tandem.

• Nicholas Hall is a hipster who listens to dubstep and is barely 30. He also has a B.S. in Information & Computer Science and has worked in industry as an engineer for approximately six years. He feels that presenting himself authentically is very important and encourages everybody else to do so as well. 

• This project should be approached with the academic, economic and humanitarian goals of everybody involved in mind.

• The first challenge will be creating a set of test criteria to ensure each milestone of the project is successful and that a testable design can be created.

• The goal of this project shall be to power a single SMS-CB tower. Cell broadcast towers fall under the jurisdiction of the FCC and are subject to regulation. 

• The team shall comply with all transparency and traceability regulations of a biomedical device such as a medical ventilator. Members representing industry will draft the documents and representatives from our academic institutions will be expected to implement them.

• Quality assurance shall be performed by industry leaders. We shall choose a local fossil fuel provider to set criteria based upon its power generation standards for fossil fuel. This is a difficult standard to achieve with solar and green generation but is within the scope of current technology. We will do the same for drinking water quality.

Other Ways You Can Help

Some people just can't contribute, but that doesn't mean they can't help:

• Please tell your friends about this project, and forward this to your community college or state college teacher.
• You can contribute space, code, servers and time to the project as an associate. 

Nicholas Hall is highly active on twitter at http://twitter.com/hallnicks

His life story can be found on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/pub/nicholas-hall/84/6b0/b53

He was born in Santa Cruz, CA near Monterey Bay.

That's all she wrote. Please keep watch here and have a good one.

ISO Solar Generator and Tap Water Purifier

We are live at igg.me/at/sunbox!

Nicholas Hall has began contacting venture capital and academic leaders about this initiative. He will be visiting the San Francisco and Monterey Bay areas this weekend starting Friday, August 1st and begin soliciting this and other initiatives to industry leaders in the Bay Area.