Saturday 19 January 2019

Trying to make the world a better place, even as it wants me dead

Over the past months, a big focus of me alongside working on my upcoming book [1][2] and of course trying to find a new full-time job, has been setting up a new website to host the range of projects that I have started last year. These include a variety of hardware projects, involving the design of PCBs in KiCad for things ranging from building monitoring and control to the controlling of LED-based room lighting, and writing the firmware to drive these boards.

The website, Nyantronics.com [3], also features the biggest project of all: Internet of Plants (soon to be renamed Greentropia). This project focuses on high-density indoor farming solutions, as a way to solve the issue of food production in today's world, and the massive pollution and habitat destructions that this causes.

By having all vegetables and fruit grown in environments that are isolated from the environment, and by having many floors of this, it solves not only the problem of habitat destruction, but also removes the need for pesticides and herbicides to be used. Further it reduces the need to transport food across the globe, as well as plastic packaging.

Our focus is on moving to hydroponics and fogponics, so as to remove the need for soil and to optimise plant growth. A big part of making indoor farming like this work is to make it as energy-efficient as possible. So far we have been researching various grow LED options and of course hydroponics, fogponics and related to reduce the amount of energy required to produce fruit and vegetables, as well as look at making staple foods such as rice and soy beans work in this setting.

Looking at comparable efforts, such as the big EDEN ISS [4] project, we can see the potential here, and slowly we're bringing others into the project as well. It's a multi-disciplinary project, bringing together botany, biology, electronics, physics, anthropology, software development, mechanical engineering and many more fields. This makes it into an incredibly challenging but also incredibly fun project.


And yet, when I woke up this morning, I felt horrible. All I could see was this young child inside of me with adults yelling at it and generally being complete and utter jerks. The latter being mostly the people who are trying to kick me out of the apartment where I'm currently staying, merely on account of disliking me. Add to this the pressure of still being unemployed and having nowhere to go if I want to keep my unemployment benefits and health insurance.

Some days I'm not sure how things got this way. When you always tried to do things properly and always be nice and friendly to people, it's the worst kind of feeling when you aren't merely met with indifference, but with outright hostility. To know that you're not even a stain in the eyes of some people, but something far less.

And there's always that young child in the dark room. Terrified of adults. Never daring to trust adults again after what those adults did to her 5-year old self. The me today who is trying to get past those experiences, but who just keeps being reminded that adults are never to be trusted, not ever again.


I'm still hoping that I won't get kicked out of the apartment next month now that a date to have it forcibly cleared has been set. It's going to cost me a lot more money on lawyers and related adult fun to try and avoid this.

I'm still hoping that I will get that new job, get to move to a new place and that just for once these horrible things stop happening to me. I'm still trying. Still hoping.

I finally want that five-year old me to feel safe for the very first time. To move on and focus on these projects that can transform the world and the future of humanity. Not keep being stuck dealing with the same horrible types of people and revisiting the same old traumas over and over again.

Instead I want that fascinating future, working on cool projects that enrich me and humanity as a whole. To get this world away from this eternal darkness that threatens to swallow everything because there are certain adults who insist on living at the cost of others.


Maya


[1] https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/hands-embedded-programming-c17
[2] https://amzn.to/2Vl79wP
[3] http://www.nyantronics.com/index.php
[4] https://eden-iss.net/

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