Canadian Digs Out Basement Using Only Radio Controlled Scale Tractors and Trucks | Hacker News Reader

Canadian Digs Out Basement Using Only Radio Controlled Scale Tractors and Trucks

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Sometimes I come across grand hobbies/challenges like this that inspire me to challenge myself in similar ways..

1/4 scale grave digger: http://www.youtube.com/user/rcWizzard/videos?sort=da&vie...

Matthias Wandel's various projects: http://woodgears.ca

Giant robot project: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL13A11662BDE6EB83

But at some point, I end up convincing myself that it's a bad investment of my time. Some examples:

- The above referenced 1/4 grave digger project would be an awesome test of my fabrication skills. But when it's done, I won't enjoy playing with it. 1000's of hours for "push stick forward, vehicle goes foreword". Kind of like lego's, the fun's all in the build.

- I'd love to get into woodworking, but I already have all the furniture I need. Why would I invest in a 1k wood shop (that's CL prices)? What would I create with all the tools and experience? I'm not going to quit my job as a programmer to become an entry-level woodworker.

- I'd love to build my own sawmill (kind of like Jaimie), and build from nature in general. But where would I get wood? Can I make it cheaper than store bought? Do I have the time to invest so that I don't wind up having to go to the store anyway?

- I'm really fascinated by CNC, 3d printers, and metal casting. I want to be able to make my own stuff, and excuse myself from a consumer culture. But those things all involve pretty significant money/time investments. And who are we kidding? After that huge investment, what am I going to print/cast/machine.. that would be worth that investment?

And that's the motivation for my side project.

You could try building a simple CNC machine. Then you could test your fabrication skills and use it afterwards to make cool stuff. It wouldn't have to be anything complicated either. Use a simple drill for the blade and make some sort of arm to move it around. Then write a basic program to run it. Follow YC's style. Make something simple as fast as you can that just works and then as time goes by improve it. Man, I think I know what I'm doing this weekend.

You don't really do a hobby like this because it will save you money, or because you need the end result, you do it because it's fun. I've just started building a reprap (3d printer) not because I need low-rez cheap plastic thingies, but because it's fun and challenging.

Why not see if there's a MakerBench or other hackerspace near you and just rent some time on the machines rather than buying your own?

A good motivation is find someone else to buy it from you. Offer to make it for the cost of materials plus a little more.

They get a good deal, and you get some fun (the build) that actually has a purpose.

Or find someone to make it for as a gift.

I'm sure some people think its pointless, but I say it beats the hell out of watching TV.

Don't be ridiculous. Mad Men, Justified, Breaking Bad, 30 Rock, Community, Boardwalk Empire, Treme, etc. etc. there's tons of really good stuff on TV these days.

I agree, but there still is a qualitative difference between an active an a passive activity.

Sitting on your butt and controlling a toy truck just barely qualifies as active.

I'd say if you're watching something on DVR and fast forwarding the commercials you're 50% there.

I can't tell if you're being serious or not...

He designed and built the system. It's not a question of how many calories he burned, but the difference between creation and consumption.

OTOH, he's mostly doing consumption now, after the initial creation.

Now he's creating a hole. He has to plan and make decisions at every step of the way, his will guides the progress of the activity, in contrast to TV which is a passive. I'm not making a value judgement based on the relative merits of the two activities, but the distinction still exists.

Meh, there's better stuff in real life.

So you never watch any movies, read any books, play any games or listen to any music or anything because "there's better stuff in real life." right?

What a ridiculous attitude.

As elemenohpee pointed out above, it's really a difference between creation and consumption. Always be doing.

If I need to just relax, instead of coding non-stop, instead of watching TV and melting my brain, I"ll just play guitar, or sketch, or grab the camera and go for a walk around town and see if there's anything interesting to photograph. (although I'll admit, it's much easier to do in a somewhat urban environment, that's walkable, and people are about, suburbia kills, man) Playing guitar is especially nice, cuz I can mindlessly do it for hours, and let my brain wander around while I"m just strummin out random chords. On top of all that, who has time for TV? After work there's always something goin on, Tuesdays it's the running club, Wednesday the pub 2 blocks down has $1.50 pints, Thursday is bowling league (actually more fun than you'd imagine, especially when you becomes friends with all the randos in the league.) Weeks are for travel (SKI TRIP) You gotta fill your life up to the brim, not spend it inside with the curtains drawn, and boobtube glowin! Why live vicariously though a screen, when you can do it for real. I hate watching other people have fun and build relationships, when I'm not. That's exactly what I see, and what I'm not doing, when I watch TV.

TV shows are fine every now and then, but I'm not a regular to any one show. My GF can't stay up through an entire movie (narcolepsy city), so maybe we'll watch an episode or two of Glee on Sunday night, but that's about it. I love books, and always try to read for a bit just before bed. I think that stimulates the imagination a bit more than tv though.

Now I'm not saying TV is evil, and you shouldn't watch it, I'm just putting my alternative point of view out there. To each his own.

edit: I didn't downvote you, I don't believe in doing that on disagreements, I think you bring an interesting case.

You're not the only one with this viewpoint.

Here's some of what I do during the week:

Monday: go to a classical concert or opera. And it's free as I live near IU.

Tuesday: go to contradance, and an awesome Scottish bar afterwards.

Wednesday: can do multiple things: contradance, hackerspace (only 1 in Indiana), or heavy rapier fencing. And they're all at the same time.

Thursday: Renaissance dance or musician for dancers (I do both).

Friday: was in jazz quartet that fell apart. Looking for group who's willing for a C-Mel player. (note: it's a key of c saxophone that was made back in '27. Conn quit production in '34.)

Saturday: I work on my projects and hackeries that interest me. That ranges from arduino work all the way to lapidary and silversmithing to woodworking and bladesmithing to glassworking.

Sunday: more fighter practice, blended with calligraphy, illumination, leatherworking, and other completely random stuffs.

Note that I also work a crappy 3rd shift job ('be glad you have a job', they say). So many things that occur when I would sleep are unavailable to me.

I perhaps watch an hour of tv a week, maybe more. And it's always watched via bittorrent.

IU, eh, it's a gorgeous campus in my opinion. I was there once for a race (in college), and the only thing I remember (or don't remember) from that weekend is playing sink the biz at Nick's. In fact, I still have the mason jar beer mug I "liberated" from them.

Man, sounds like me before I got married. Though to be honest, my wife keeps telling me I should get out and do more stuff, so I can't blame it on her/kids.

False dichotomy.

I was blown away by Breaking Bad and can't wait for the next episode. I really enjoy it and it can be inspiring. But I don't kid myself into believing that I'm doing something productive.

What is productive? I remember someone here being really pleased with themselves because they'd cut down on the time they "wasted" gossiping, and learned Chinese instead. But they never said anything about actually using the Chinese.

I enjoy making things too, but I don't kid myself into believing that I'm doing something "better" than watching TV.

I'd have preferred it if the trucks/tractors were fully autonomous, now that would have been awesome :)

Or run by mechanical turk HITs...

That is what I imagined in the first place. How cool it would be to have your garden or diy proyect being taken care by small autonomous machines like that. No danger of being smashed if something goes wrong, cheaper parts, if one has a mechanical problems not everything is stoped, just a fraction of the work force...

And it can be running 24/7 while you're sleeping/playing skyrim/etc./etc. which would be indescribably awesome :)

>playing sky rim Screw that, I'd be sitting in my lawn chair watching the trucks all day!

The fact that he was able to do it at all means that this should be a logical next step. There may even be a business idea here. Program good enough Computer Vision and planning AI you could loan a set of autonomous robots to someone and pick them up after 6 months when the job is complete. It would probably be much cheaper than the human alternative.

You don't even have to program. Set it up to be controlled by people in india or china. This kind of business could be set up in a few days, and which begs the question - how com no-one is doing this. There's companies trying to sell laptops on a stick (anybots) whereas this is a genuinely useful service. Trevor Blackwell should be able to get something like that up in day, he did a segway clone in a day.

how com no-one is doing this

because it takes 7 years to dig out a single basement?

That's only because he was doing it as a hobby and because it's one person. A team of workers with larger equipment working 24 hours a day in shifts over the internet could get it done much quicker and cheaper.

In addition to digging basements, there's also grass cutting, delivery bots in restaurants, hospitals, tractor driving.

having people in india control it is probably isn't that much cheaper than hiring someone to actually drive it. it mostly likely does not cover your costs of developing systems to remotely control expensive and destructive construction equipment from thousands of miles away.

This is where someone on HN developes a remote-system-as-a-service.

Shit, I was going to post about someone on HN doing just that, but then I remembered that might still be under NDA.

If I understand it right the first rule of NDA is you do not talk about NDA.

It's been a lot of years, and I think the information revealed by my posting on the topic is sufficiently de minimis that no harm is done. I did hesitate for a while over the "reply" button, though.

The exception is when you're operating in difficult environments, where the cost of putting people there is huge (life support costs, hazard pay, losses, etc.).

Space is the obvious example (manned spaceflight might be a good thing politically, or for inspiring people, but no one contests that robots are far more efficient for almost any mission).

A closer to home example is commercial diving. They used to pay people $100-500k/yr to do saturation diving, fairly frequently, at deep sites. Maybe 3-6 weeks of prep, a ship, a transfer chamber, on-deck chamber, a team of support staff, a team of divers, and lots of equipment. Instead, now, they send down a ROV (usually operated from the ship above, but conceivably these could be centrally teleoperated someday too, or autonomous). Commercial divers are still used for smaller tasks, especially where they're not doing saturation diving, but the saturation diving industry in general has been increasingly restricted to shallower jobs or jobs requiring a large amount of work at a single site (involving lots of manual fitting). For the very deepest dives, ROVs and atmospheric diving suits (basically single-person submarines) have basically taken over -- the deep dive record was set in 1992 and no one has tried to match it.

There's also the EOD market (iRobot's packbot), hazmat environments, war zones, etc., where teleoperated equipment will get more and more popular.

Workers are actually pretty expensive, more than $20 dollars per hour plus benefits. Then there is the risk of injury which is quite common in construction and mining. The workers in india wouldn't have those problems. To them it would like a video game (no injuries) and their pay would less than $1 per hour, no benefits. We already have pilots flying drones in afghanistan from nevadda in real time. The costs of this equipment are not much compared to the labor costs, so outsourcing is viable.

The length of time it took is probably more a factor of the tiny trucks and backhoes. One can dig out a similar sized hole in weeks using regular equipment.

Real time tele-operations are very expensive and require specialized equipment. Military drone ops cost billions of dollars. Bomb squad robots and law enforcement drones cost half a mil on up. Even the toy dump truck FTA costs $5000. In addition to the equipment cost, there is no way the latency could be compensated for over the regular internet. None of this would make sense for a residential excavation

It's actually really cheap to get a basement dug, in the midwest it's like $1500-$3000 to dig the hole, depending on the size. I've heard as little as $800 for a smaller basement.

> Real time tele-operations are very expensive and require specialized equipment.

Because this is the current state of affairs doesn't mean it has to be this way in 2 years. That's the very definition of disruption.

Real time teleoperation costs billions? Everyone (almost), even in third countries, has skype running, which probably is more bandwith intensive than teleoperation would be. And with teleoperation, there are parts where automation can make it even less bandwith. Plus, one worker can probably control a few machines at the same time while some parts of operation are automated. irobot has this feature (you tell a robot to go somewhere, it goes there, meanwhile you can do something else).

You're baked if you think you can control a bulldozer from India over Skype.

Parent never said "over Skype". And NASA controlled the mars rovers from earth with "nearly five times the speed of home dial-up"; I'm pretty sure you can get more than that from India to the US.

He says over Skype in the post I replied to. Mars rover is not real time, doesn't actually do anything, 5 of them failed, there is a team of highly trained scientists and engineers running the project and the whole thing has cost almost $1B. The current state of the art does not seem to suggest that it is possible for $1 workers in India to dig a basement in Illinois with a tractor controlled over the internet. It certainly is not possible for less than what it costs to just hire local workers to do it.

He said they have Skype running. He didn't say the control would happen over Skype.

Mars rover is not real time, doesn't actually do anything, 5 of them failed, there is a team of highly trained scientists and engineers running the project and the whole thing has cost almost $1B.

I was talking about the bandwidth, not the rest. Yes, Mars rovers were stupidly expensive and difficult. It's freaking Mars. I'm pretty sure we don't need to launch a rocket to get stuff to Illinois, that we don't have a latency of 4h20m and that we can have one guy or two on the location to take care of any issue.

The current state of the art does not seem to suggest that it is possible for $1 workers in India to dig a basement in Illinois with a tractor controlled over the internet. It certainly is not possible for less than what it costs to just hire local workers to do it.

Frankly, without numbers I'm not persuaded either way. Consider the advances in farming vehicles it seems plausible to me.

Holy smokes what a terrible analogy. Most of the cost for the Mars rovers was getting them to Mars. They would have been a whole lot cheaper if 1) We could have delivered them by container ship and 2) We could have had some guy on mars plug them in so we didn't need cells or batteries and 3) that same guy could service them when they break down.

#3 is a big deal. Planetary probes are way, way, way overdesigned compared to what you need on the earth, and all those "ways" cost exponential amounts of money. It probably wouldn't make sense to try to do everything on the job site remotely, but there's really no reason a teleoperated tractor has to cost substantially more than one with a guy in it.

* At least anything to do with humans is probably subject to regulation.

* Unions

* The technology probably isn't quite there yet

When FarmVille came out, I started wondering how I could leverage the help to man my real farm. People were jumping at the chance to do the work for free, it seemed only logical to capitalize on it. I never did find a solution, but I still believe there is one looming out there.

I'm pretty sure a real farm doesn't have much to do with FarmVille, except for the names and some concepts. And besides, writing an algorithm to do what people do on FV is easy enough. The hard parts on a farm is data acquisition, crunching it (which requires experts to write software for) and the manual labor.

Oh wow. I don't know about anyone else, but I got impatient just watching the second video. I cannot imagine doing that for six whole years! Haha, unreal! If it's what he has a passion for, however, more power to him.

(I'm still in awe over how long that would have taken and the fact he didn't give in and start shoveling!)

Wow, talk about cognitive surplus. It's also amusing that the article title starts with "Canadian", as if that explains it all. (Insert comment about American parochialism here)

quite an expensive hobby

http://www.gardentrucking.com/products.tpl?action=Search&...

the dump truck is 5000$

You can buy a used Bobcat or 3/4-ton pickup for that much!

Makes me wonder whether there's a future business for a Mechanical, Mechanical Turk.

If we've got machines capable of labour but lacking the intelligence and internet connected workers who can provide the intelligence you could use a gig like this to get real-world work done while offshoring the human cost.

Could all get a bit Toy Soliders if you mistreat your workforce but would be pretty epic to watch.

From a land of people that are obsessed by skiing, this is not the most pointless hobby one can have, and it's probably pretty safe.

I noticed that a few people see little value in this. Some people feel that the time spent would have been just as good watching TV. However, beyond the simple inspiration, consider that even small endeavours are useful because they provide a "set of shoulders" on which the next person can stand.

How is this different from Minecraft?

I know almost nothing about RC gadgets. But those are some badass toys.

I wonder what the battery capacity is on those things. How often does he need to charge? I'd love to see a record of the electricity cost to excavate a basement with small motors.

He seems to have loads of videos on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/LilGiantsConstrCo

7 years playing with RC tractors and trucks? I admire him for simulating a whole digging site, but I hope also that he was doing his hobby just 2-3 hours per day.

Why do you say that? What's wrong with doing a hobby for more that 2-3 hours a day?

Because that's his basement, where his hot water heater is surrounded by dirt where one could also assume the washing machine and clothes dryer is.

One the one hand, the scale of this dirt playground and expensive radio controlled cars would make any grown man weep for a chance to be 10 years old again. On the other hand, you have to hope that this much obsession for 100% perfectly-scaled realism isn't as creepy as it looks.

In any event, this is impressive.

weekends during winter as he is busy during crop season.

I was most impressed by his skill in controlling the vehicles. In one video he loads debris into a dump truck using a front loader with great fineness. I've rarely seen operators of 1:1 scale equipment work with such grace. You may not know it but it's very difficult to load a dump truck efficiently and safely.

Here is the relevant thread http://www.scale4x4rc.org/forums/showthread.php?t=25724

Hmm, with a miniature cement sprayer, he might be able to install the foundation at the same time.

Just think it is a great idea, kudos to him.

was all this automated or he do it by hand?

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