UltimApe

“I’m a cyborg slime-mold brain fungus piloting a complex exosuit made of flesh. Wandering scholar, and informavore.”

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See project proposal:

Report for 2022-12-15

See all reports:

Progress Made

    Got Banking & access to funds.

    Order & acquired most tools & hardware, and a significant portion of materials.

Current Status

    Working on setting up Lab Space & order microelectronics parts.

Obstacles Encountered & Adaptations

  • Difficulty with getting ID for access to a bank.
    • Got help from family members.
  • Couldn’t accept mail/shipments at address.
    • Shipped to friends and family.
  • Landlord forced us to vacate to renovate & wanted more rent
    • Figured out how to get P.L. in a Short Bus, purchased a cheap one.
    • Arranged for a garage workspace until the bus is suitable.
    • Moved most of the house to offsite storage. Sleeping on a cot, lol.
  • Bus Transmission Broke
    • Currently having Norman stay w/ friend in the Burlington area to orchestrate repairs, while we are collaborating remotely.
  • Lambda Labs is excessively overpriced. Challenges getting computer parts + shift in ability to power multiple rigs.
    • Opted to go with two Razer brand laptops w/ external GPU bays. Allows for low power until we need to run ML compute workloads (once acquired GPU).
  • Difficulty with rapidly changing costs associated with parts and materials.
    • We managed to get a significant number of things planned to order just in time for Black Friday / Cyber Monday and were able to get significant deals on some of the larger tools and hardware.

Significant Changes

Due to an unexpected drastic change in living situation, we had to vacate Praetor Labs’ location. We were unable to find a location to use that was in our six month budget. We chose to renovate a very cheap short bus to turn it into a mobile workspace, borrowing a garage in the meantime.

We have been able to convert the Facilities and much of the Personal spending into building out the Bus, including getting some pretty extensive batteries and solar. Because of this (once the bus is set up) we will have made a significant reduction in our overall living costs moving forward and should be able to work on Project Viril for a lot longer than planned. So despite the setback, this still enables us to get it off the ground.

We had unfortunately already spent some time prepping our work areas for being able to run a live steam and to produce youtube content as we went along. Since the living situation changed we’ve sadly undone all that. We’re refocusing on getting all the parts ordered and doing a lot more planning to make sure once the bus is set up we’ll be able to jump on media production as soon as possible.

While quite a big setback for us, we are still moving ahead with the project as best as we can and believe we’ll still be able to succeed. Although we may have added a month or two delay on being able to actually produce bulk microscopes. We are not yet certain how much timeline slip this has caused until the bus is back from getting its transmission fixed.

The biggest potential hurdle is the weather. At the time of writing this we are waiting for a big snowstorm here in Vermont. Nick would have been going to his mother’s to have a better environment to work on software. It isn’t a lot of delay, but a couple days here and there are going to add up. To mitigate this we have acquired a large thermal fishing hut and other items to ensure we are not completely without options should the winter be worse than the last few years. Once the Bus is prepared the weather will no longer be as big of a concern.