A paper on Disarmadillo project has been published in the last issue of Robotica magazine.

After some cutting and pasting of old stamp trials, here is the official stamp of Snail Aid, obviously done with recycled material!

gatto wrote:

Yesterday, with 3 friends (fenny, petrus and ferretz), we went to the presentation of a revolutionary machine for eolic energy exploitation: the kitegen.

This promising technology is based on the idea of using the wind where it has most of both speed and stability, great heights. A kite is taken to high heights (simulations have been performed up to 2000 m) and all the power provided by the wind for lifting the kite is transferred by means of two ropes to two alternators generating electrical power.

The most clever concept (in Italy we'd say the Columbus' egg) is the way to retrieve the kite towards the ground with almost no energy consumption, for starting again the lifting phase, where energy is again generated. have a look at the video, below

All this development and brilliant ideas gave us some inspiration that we hope you'll find on this website one day...

the kitegen structure durin the visit

stay tuned

Ceppo wrote:

I'm near to the end of my trip.

Today we went to the Italian embassy in Amman to present test results and later on we discussed them with NPA and NCDR at the University of Jordan.

Everybody seems very happy, personally i'm as LOCOSTRA works very well!

Here is a picture taken during the last phase of test in a suspected hazardous area (an area already cleared of mines but with many missing mines) in the Jordan valley, near to the Batism site and the dead sea.

LOCOSTRA equipped with the mulcher could cut very well low, medium and heavy vegetation.

We only had one problem with an hydraulic hose, fixed in 6 hours as we could easily find a new hose in a shop in Amman.

Tomorrow some more tests with the potato digger and the large loop detector and then we change wheels for the shipment.

ciao

ceppo

Ceppo wrote:

Tomorrow we will move LOCOSTRA from the minefields at the border between Syria and Jordan to the suspected hazardous areas (SHAs) in the Jordan Valley where there should be vegetation to try the mulcher.

The first part of tests was succesful!!

Up to now, LOCOSTRA resisted very well five explosions. LOCOSTRA was driven over live anti personnel mines ranging from 30g of TNT to 250g of TNT. The lst explosion was actually 280g of TNT as the PMN mine we firstly used didn't explode while driven over and we had to add another mine on the top to obtain the destruction of the mine.

Also the first experiments with the potato digger works well, it process soil and leaves mines on top of the processed lane as foreseen.

Everything weel until now, I have also had the chance to meet the female deminer team mainly composed by beduin graduated women. Very nice!

I will try to upload some pcitures in the next days as here the connection is not very good.

Thanks to all deminers who helped me,  the NPA and NCDR staff and Frank from GICHD.

ciao

Ceppo wrote:

Not to speak about the tractor (that is still waiting at the border), I tell a bit about the visit to the minefields where the tractor should be tested.

It is in a security area, checked by the Jordan military. After showing the security pass, I’m allowed to enter and we follow the paved road running almost straight for more than 30km. On the left hand side we can see far away olive trees and other agricultural farms in the Syrian side, then closer to us a bump (built to prevent mines to migrate into Syria) running all parallel to the border and then, a little bit closer to us the minefield ( in the Jordan side). On the right hand side of the road we are on there is potentially arable land not exploited because of the proximity with mines.

The minefield runs all along the border for 105 km.

This border is crossed by smugglers entering Jordan illegally to bring eroin in the country. Some dummy soldiers hang from the fences of barber wire which define the minefield.

They are used to scary smugglers and prevent them crossing the minefield at night. I learn that smugglers are good deminers as sometimes they are able to defuse mines and remove them from the ground.

The area within and outside from the minefield is in certain points covered by hard lava stones. Here and there across the minefield it can be notice that some stones are collected in small pyramids; they indicate smugglers the safe road to follow, as small pyramids of rocks indicate the paths in mountains.

Apart from risking their life, smugglers are an obstacle to demining activities because they remove mines without a proper recording. All mines here are recorded and maps are available to demining organizations.

Qasam tells me that once per week or once every two weeks a smuggler is injured in this minefield.

Although it’s wet and operations are stopped because of safety, Qasam let me entering a minefield, following him, both wearing personal protecting equipment.

Qasam opens up a passage in the barber wire fence and we are in. Generally, in all minefields where I have been, it’s not very easy to find a mine; one of the major tasks is to find where landmines are. Here we can see five landmines on the surface of the area that still needs to be cleared.

One is here:

Ceppo wrote:

Another difficult day at the custom!

After having waited for four days, for the tractor to be transported from Tartous in Syria to Jordan (it was supposed to arrive the day after the disembraking from Grimaldi boat, the 15th of Februray, with me, in Jordan), today with a strong team composed by six people from the university of Jordan and myself, we arrived at the Nasib border between Syria and Jordan to finally clear and collect the tractor.... but, we found out that there are 2 customs at less than 5 km one from the other in the same town, and, of course, the tractor was in one and we together with all the paper needed for clearance were in the other. So we spent almost all day discussing the possibility lo unload the tractor in the free zone between Syria and Jordan and clear it in the other custom.

So now the tractor is in the free zone between the two countries, very near to me, as i'm now hosted by NPA in a container 500m away from the border.

Let's hope tmorrow it can enter Jordan and the tests can start.

LOCOSTRA and trailer on their way from Syria to Jordan (photo courtesy of Ramy Fahoom)

ciao!

ceppo

gatto wrote:

Just a small update and some information regarding the new site.

The site was built on the chassis of gpEasy, a wonderful peace of software released under gpl license (don't know the version) that is turning 2.0 in these days (just upgraded to version 2.0b2). Thanks to its developers

This allows an easy management of a website with static pages, a blog and some galleries, that is exactly what we need here at Snail Aid. Some plugins are available (the blog is one of them) and we are trying them, in order to see what's useful and what draws away the attention.

Moreover, some more tweaking needs to be done, the theme needs just a lighter banner, as the present one is quite heavy. The theme is based on the standard one from gpEasy, called One_Point_5, with some color change and the adoption of a banner I think it looks awesome, even better than the old one (to which we inspired anyway).

The old websites will be available temporarily, until we finish porting all the contents here. then we'll shut them down.

Finally, as you can guess, we decided to adopt just one language for the site, therefore, bye bye Italian, by now...
Most of the documentation and people we deal with are not italian, therefore it's must faster and much more useful to keep English as the main language. 

We're very sorry for this decision, but the maintenance of two languages corresponded to twice the work and was becoming too much time demanding. We hope it's not a big disturb. By the way, don't hesitate writing us an email to get some information in Italian (or even Spanish...).

Ok, that's all by now. comments are always welcome, just click on the post title to enable them.

Come back soon for more!

gatto wrote:

Hi everyone, this is our new website and this is the new blog of Snail Aid.

We have some great news:

• We are slightly recovering the website from the old one and things are proceeding quite fast, new theme just adjusted, some tweak on the banner still to be done, but the most is done;
• Emanuela (Ceppo) is on her way to Jordan, to perform tests on the new demining machine, we are waiting for some news from her
• I (Gatto) should be back working on some nerdy stuff on free software and hardware.

Emanuela should be updating the blog while doing the tests, so we can follow her activities from here.

Stay tuned...