Press "Enter" to skip to content

GOAT Posts

Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter

Published November 18, 2024 by Liz Henry

We now have a newsletter! It is called GOAT Notes, and has a cute little logo of a cartoon goat holding up a paper scroll, having taken a bite out of the paper.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for free, but there is also an option to donate to support the newsletter, and our organization, via Stripe, when you sign up.

I have not decided on newsletter frequency. There may be a cadence of once per month, but with shorter updates for announcements of new events. Or, I could aim for a short update roughly once per week. Either way, a frequency between weekly and monthly seems likely.

You can also read, share, or link to the back archives of GOAT Notes, someday when we have more than one issue!

a cute cartoon goat holding a paper scroll that says GOAT Notes. there is a bite out of the top of the scroll for extra cuteness

Leave a Comment

Be Seen on Halloween: a workshop for DIY lights and safety mods

Published November 7, 2024 by Liz Henry

In a collaboration between GOAT and San Francisco’s Independent Living Resource Center, we held a pilot workshop in downtown SF last month, where we provided lights, reflectors, reflective tape, and other useful modifications for mobility gear.

This is a photo heavy post! Here’s me smiling to welcome you to this workshop:
white non binary person with glasses and purple hair, smiling, wearing tshirt with wheelchair user with symbolic flames trailing behind them

We hosted at ILRCSF, where Vince Lopez runs a free wheelchair repair program. There, SF residents can get maintenance and repair done on their tech – and if you get stuck at home or on the street with a broken chair, Vince will come out, fix the chair or get you to a safe place and take the chair for repairs. You can even borrow a loaner powerchair, scooter, or manual chair. Also from ILRCSF, Marisol Ferrante joined us, to show off the Nick Feldman assistive tech lending library, another great free resource.

Vince displaying a walker with spiral LEDs:
Vince, smiling latino man with a flat cap, holding a lit up walker

We laid out all the gear that we bought to try out for the event, including reflectors and headlamps made for bicycles, reflective tape, and various kinds of LED strips; mounting clamps, straps, cable ties, gaffer tape, and portable usb battery packs.

an array of small gadgets laid out on a tablecloth

None of this is very “high tech” but having it all there together made a great introduction to thinking about ways to modify mobility gear. When you set out to do this, you have several issues in play:

* DURABILITY: The mods need to be very durable for heavy use, or easily replaceable.
* PINCH POINTS: You need to be aware of how your chair, scooter, walker, etc. fold or are put into storage or, say, a car trunk, so you avoid putting any fragile components onto “pinch points”.
* ATTACHMENT POINTS: You need to consider ways to attach things to your gear. That may mean velcro or cable ties to a metal tube frame, or some other method of attachment. Clamps meant for motorcycles, bikes, or camera tripods often work well, but every wheelchair is different, and people also have different use patterns for them.
* POWER: If you are dealing with electronics, as we were with light strips, you need a power source. I like external battery packs, because they are easy to attach to a frame, or put into a small pouch.
* COST: Often, cheaper is better! It can be a tradeoff between durability and cost, though.
* DIY-ability: You may need easy do-it-yourself solutions. Ideally we would have the resources of an auto body shop, and be able to cut and weld metal, but that isn’t always realistic!

We had a blast setting people up with gear. Everyone had a try at installing their own equipment or working with people who came with them to get lights on their walkers and wheelchairs.

Judy worked with me and her daughter to line the bottoms of her foot rest plates with twinkly christmas-light style LEDs. The LEDs also had a remote control so she could change their color. She also asked for two headlights pointing downwards from the footplate so that it would be easier for her to see curbs or bumps in the sidewalk.

Part of the fun of working with other wheelchair users for me is always seeing how they have come up with their own solutions. Judy’s main hack was that she had dozens of rubber bands of all sizes around her powerchair arm. She used these to keep her phone in place on the wide arm, and then set up the remote control for the lights on the other arm of the chair. I am adding the deceptively simple (and cheap!) “plain old rubber bands” solution to my tool box!

While we installed the lights I also noticed Judy’s foam insulation tape added to the rim of her footplates. If you have been in a powerchair user’s house you may have noticed some dents in the walls! And things like protective strips along corners that stick out, because a powerchair packs a lot of force even at low speeds. The easily replaceable, cheap foam strips are a great idea to save wear and tear on your walls and other people’s shins! But, Judy’s daughter mentioned they peel off and look kind of bad as well. I suggested narrow black gaffer tape wrapped around the foam and foot plates. It isn’t perfect, it won’t last forever, but it will look nicer and will make the foam last for a year or two instead of a month. To refresh it — just add more tape! Gaffer tape is more expensive than duct tape, but is flexible and will last much longer.


Video description: an asian american lady in a powerchair, waving, and her daughter, posing with smiles as the lights under the chair’s footrests blink and glow.

Deniz came with a travelscoot and a walker, and her own pit crew who were very enthusiastic helpers! They went for the lights, and installed COB (chip on board) LED strips along with a cable splitter and a battery pack on each device. The Y splitter means you can symmetrically install two light strips and plug them into one centrally located battery pack. Their install job was flawless!

A smiling woman with a halloween party hat, sitting on a travelscoot, with two guys doing thumbs up behind her

Bill tried out some lights of various kinds, including spoke reflectors for a manual chair. These spoke covers are small and fiddly and annoying to install, but they are also cheap and last a good long time. They also may pop off occasionally and need replacing, but I prefer that to having peeling or scraped up reflector tape making my spokes look all tattered. Bill did a few and got help with more, and then took a pack home to keep working on the project. I would like to find longer covers – they seem to come in this standard size of 3 inches and so you need multiple tubes per spoke. How much easier if they were longer! Let me know if you find a good source for these.

manual chair wheel with small reflector tubes that pop on over each spoke

A lady I met at the season opener for Philhamonia Baroque took my flyer and, fabulously, showed up with her husband and her very snazzy European style walker. She did a great job installing an LED strip set, and got a tuneup and some bolts replaced on her walker by Vince. I think that was true for others as well at the workshop.

A lady smiling proudly as she shows off her newly illuminated walker with spiral light strips attached.

Of course, one of the goals of our workshop was to let people know they can use ILRCSF’s free repair program! Marisol also led several people on tours of the Nick Feldman Lending Library where you can borrow all kinds of useful gear, try it out to see if you like it, or just keep it while you need it and return when your circumstances change. I have used this program in the past and it was incredibly helpful.

We had so much lively discussion during the workshop. Gear reviews, complaints about what doesn’t make sense about either the DME industry, health issues and health care of course, Right to Repair laws now in play in California, and plain old brainstorming about future events. I was so pleased that everyone wanted MORE hands on, DIY events in the future!

The whole event was a lot of fun. We had planned for 2 hours, but ended up staying for over 3 hours. I think next time we will try to get more helpers – because modding any assistive tech is so individual and needs individual attention, brainstorming, experimentation, and so on! And, we could try for an entire afternoon or spanning late afternoon and early evening.

Some participants want to volunteer for our next event! That may be in December or January and will likely add some other category of modification — I’m thinking about pouches and cup holders as our next focus. They are simple, and everyone wants them, but figuring out what exactly will work for a person and their device is a complex process. It may end up being clamps like the motorcyle and bike ones we had for our Halloween workshop, or it can be something like fabric, leather, canvas, or even duct and gaffer tape along with velcro. Leather working tools can also be super useful in creating custom pouches and bags to attach to a chair!

We will also be looking in future to host similar workshops in the East Bay jointly with the CIL and other organizations! Stay tuned!

Here’s a few more photos:

Me and Deniz in conversation,
smling woman with halloween party hat, liz grinning, with wheelchair in flames tshirt

Walker DIY in progress,
walker diy in progress, a seated lady with silver hair bending over her walker and its light strips with cable ties in hand

Judy and daughter,
Two asian american women smiling, one seated in powerchair with lights attached

1 Comment

Common Tools conference

Published November 7, 2024 by Liz Henry

Last month I joined some interesting thinkers at the Common Tools mini conference, invited to speak by Luis Felipe R. Murillo, as part of the SEEK Commons project.

I talked a bit about GOAT and the problem space of assistive tech in the U.S. and around the world. Gear that we as disabled people need, such as wheelchairs as well as other AT is expensive, not easily maintainable or fixable. By gathering, publishing, and preserving DIY assistive tech, we can help people get (or make!) what they need. We can also make a dent in the problems of e-waste if we are able to repair our technology, and not throw away resources, for example, lithium batteries!

Battery re-use was also a theme for Criptastic Hacker’s presentation on his wheelchair battery spot welder, which both uses something that would otherwise be thrown away, and can be used to for complex repairs!

The conference asked: “How can we help each other make sense and respond to pressing socio-technical-and-environmental problems? Looking in our past and present we can find collaborative tools, approaches, and sociocultural practices to answer this question.” There were some presenters in person at Sudo Room maker and hacker space in Oakland, and some (like me) online since it was a hybrid event.

Here are the abstracts from the event, and I’ll come back to add a link to the video recording, once it’s public!

Paths to assistive technology: Repair & DIY, Right to Repair, and Reverse Engineering
by Liz Henry

There is a lot of home-grown wisdom in disabled communities about adapting or making “assistive tech” – things like wheelchair modifications, small devices that make life easier. And there are inventors—often disabled inventors—creating super complicated devices as well. There are also books, papers, and research with plans for DIY assistive tech. Grassroots Open Assistive Tech aims to collect, preserve, and propagate that info and encourage the use of open licensing to make ecosystems for building & sharing so that more people can get the adaptive equipment they need!

Community Digital Territories: Baobáxia
by Vince Tozzi

“The idea comes from the Baobab, an African tree that lives for thousands of years and symbolically represents the collective memory of the territory. Baobáxia is the union of baobabs with galaxies. Galaxies of memories of community territories, on the Baobab Route, on the Path of the Stars..” Baobab is a network of mucuas, computers with free software, GNU/Linux, operating on the community network through the local Wi-Fi, even without internet. The mucuas host different galaxies of knowledge and digital applications such as collections, maps, blogs. All mocambolas can share their knowledge in the form of audio, videos, articles, documents, images, maps and soon much more. The knowledge of each mucua can be synchronized with the others, over the internet or on the local network through mobile mucuas. A mucua can be a very robust computer, like Madiba, which is located at the Community Data Center of the Tainã Cultural Center, or even a simple USB stick. This way, knowledge is maintained in our territories and shared on our networks. Baobáxia is created by Rede Mocambos, a collaboration between quilombolas, indigenous peoples, Nartisans, and artists from all over Brazil and beyond.

The WBSW (Wheelchair Battery Spot Welder)
by Criptastic Hacker

An eco-soluton to reporposing batteries for useful projects! Every year, many thousands of large lead-acid batteries from wheelchairs are discarded to landfill because they don’t offer enough torque for the motors to push a human across city blocks, or even around the house. However, these batteries still have a lot of instantaneous JUICE to create— sparks! This project repurposes my old wheelchair batteries into a fully functional portable spot welder. With spot welding, you can repurpose EVEN MOAR by taking recycled laptop and car Li-ion and LifePo cells and creating new packs from them—for your DIY projects like robots, outdoor sound systems, and so much moar! It’s reporposing batteries to repurpose batteries. And since the materials used in batteries are some of the most toxic to our planet and have major health and worker rights issues around the materials mining for them, getting the most life out of them possible – and de-investing from that industry – is very good for both people and the planet.

Resisting Contextual Collapse: How an Internet of Places (iPlaces) can help Field Stations and Marine Labs Operationalize FAIR and CARE Principles for Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice
by Erin Robinson & Neil Davies

Research stations help scientists gather data at source and witness the resilience and fragility of our planet firsthand. Despite their role in understanding the complex physical, biogeochemical, ecological, social, and economic interactions that constitute place, station contributions and those of the local community often remain unrecognized. Metadata describing the samples/data they help originate is too easily stripped or lost as value is added downstream. To fight this “contextual collapse,” we present a new publishing platform (iPlaces) that empowers investigators to publish descriptions of their field projects (marker papers) in a station journal, providing each project with a landing page and a digital object identifier. Through the familiar manuscript review process (with the station director acting as editor), iPlaces introduces a way to layer ethical, legal, social, and scientific metadata to field research. Part of a collaborative ecosystem, iPlaces links and leverages a suite of online services (e.g., GEOME, ORCID, DataCite, iSamples, Local Contexts), promoting their uptake in place-based research. In this talk, I will focus on our recent work with Local Contexts, where iPlaces enables a station to issue ‘notices’ for a proposed project, thus initiating dialogue with local communities and combatting “parachute science”. Communities can then issue ‘labels’, a form of social metadata (e.g., Prior Informed Consent), to projects and their downstream field samples/data, helping to operationalize CARE as well as FAIR data principles. As data and samples move downstream, value-added products are linked automatically through the global open science infrastructure, ensuring the connection back to place (the station and its associated communities). iPlaces thus positions stations as crucial partners connecting nature and communities to the global research enterprise, supporting scientific discovery and environmental stewardship in the service of people, places, and planet. (link to FAIR: https://fairisland.org/)

Community Science Air Quality Monitoring for Environmental Justice
by José Ramon Becerra Vera

Open hardware and community science provide populations overburdened by pollution with the tools, knowledge, and data to advocate for environmental justice. Communities are often the first to notice pollution in their homes and neighborhoods. Yet, they are frequently excluded from scientific research that follows initial reports of smells, tastes, and health symptoms. This disconnect misses the opportunity to teach communities about pollution while neglecting local experiences that could help understand exposure, identify toxic sources and high concentrations, and contribute to environmental science. Implementing open technologies like DIY air monitors in community science can teach and empower participants as experts in instrumentation, data, and analysis and enable communities to explore research questions shaped by their unique experiences. Open hardware allows pollution-affected communities to harness their lived experiences, newly developed expertise and collected environmental data to drive meaningful environmental justice efforts.

Air Quality
by Eseibio Halliday aka “The Revolutionary Eseibio The Automatic“

Rap song written by Eseibio will be performed live to close the event.

1 Comment

Right to repair review

Published September 30, 2024 by openassistivetech_e02gls

Right to repair laws are a disability justice issue for those of us who need technological devices for our basic ability to function in the world. All of these things integrate with our bodies and lives in a deeply intimate level.

We may need to fix our wheelchairs, scooters, or powerchairs, things that give us mobility. We may need to understand our hearing aid, cochlear implant, screen reader, brailler, augmentive / assistive communication devices. Or we might need to maintain, troubleshoot, and repair prosthetic devices – a limb, a motorized brace, an exoskeleton, even an eye. They are our essential companions, part of our cyborg selves. Assistive tech shouldn’t be treated as a sort of rental or subscription, a cash cow service needed by the desperate to be exploited, or a throwaway victim of planned obsolescence.

Because of that tension, disabled people are often at the forefront of right to repair advocacy.

This helpful page from repair.org outlines the current legal landscape, state by state, for those of us who are fighting to fix our assistive tech: What are my repair rights?

Currently, there are state right to repair laws in California, Minnesota, Colorado, and New York; another bill is up for review in 2025 in Oregon and in many other states!

While this issue hits especially hard for disabled people, it’s just good common sense in many ways for anyone who buys or uses electronic devices.

It also makes sense for protecting the environment from piles of useless trash that pollutes the land around it with materials extracted from the earth at a great human and ecological price. The less we waste, the better – for everyone.

a wooden sign painted with the word REPAIR in an old fashioned font, on a workbench
Leave a Comment

California Right to Repair – SB 1384 Power wheelchairs – repair

Published September 30, 2024 by Liz Henry

California SB 1384 passed and was just signed into law by the governor. This right to repair legislation is about powered wheelchairs in particular. In short:

– The criteria have been broadened, or relaxed, for who qualifies as an independent repair shop for power wheelchairs;
– “documentation, parts, embedded software, firmware, and tools used to inspect, diagnose, maintain, and repair the wheelchair” must be provided to “an owner or an independent repair provider for the purposes of providing service on the equipment”

This is great news. It should be helpful for us (the disabled powerchair owners) to fix, or get our chairs, fixed as quickly as possible! Thanks to all the advocates out there who worked so hard to get this made into law.

Honestly, it should also be great news for the wheelchair manufacturers. They now have extra incentives to plan and design for maintainability of their equipment. I hope they have been following along with the legislation and are prepared to do that. The result will be that their customers will be a lot happier!

And I am loving the details in this bill about firmware and diagnostic tools – two things that I’d like to have for my own chair that have previously been refused to me by the manufacturer. It may be a battle over what they will hold back as a trade secret, but at least we have a starting point for that battle.

It also includes:
(1)Batteries.
(2)Battery chargers.
(3)Nonprogrammable joysticks.
(4)Joystick housings or brackets.
(5)Wheel assembly.
(6)Nonpositioning accessories.
(7)Antitip devices.
(8)Armrests, excluding positioning components designed for adjustment by a therapist or assistive technology professional.
(9)Caster spheres.
(10)Cosmetic shrouding.
(11)Floor mats.
(12)Floor plates.
(13)Nonpowered leg lowerers.

Here’s the text of the bill: https://digitaldemocracy.calmatters.org/bills/ca_202320240sb1384

And here is a PDF with some extra analysis from earlier this year: https://apcp.assembly.ca.gov/system/files/2024-06/sb-1384-dodd-apcp-analysis.pdf

motor controller diagram for action arrow wheelchair
Leave a Comment

Powerchair battery tinkering at General Lithium

Published September 15, 2024 by openassistivetech_e02gls

Last week we held a little powerchair hack night with GOAT, Justin from General Lithium, CriptasticHacker and associates from Spokeland, Morgan from CIL, and more friends, to explore the battery technology of Whill Fi and Ci powerchairs. A Ci battery teardown is in progress along with an investigation into the Fi and its charger.

There was also knitting, and an adorable small support dog on a fluffy cushion. I had a cool moment realizing how many of us knew, or had worked with or learned from, John Benson (aka, “Cripple A”). I was thinking John, a fabulous human being, should get an award, and Morgan said, what he would really like is a parade. My mind took off with this great idea! What if we had a fabulous parade in his honor, with musical instruments and punk marching bands and a zillion wheelchair users zooming around?! We will also hopefully see him and some other repair and DIY wizards at our upcoming events!

a probably AI generated image of a futuristic looking glowing powerchair on a glowing disco platform

We didn’t do any formal talks or introductions, but CriptasticHacker kicked off by talking about one of his finished projects, the WBSW, Wheelchair Battery Spot Welder!

We have learned some things from cracking apart the Ci battery.

  • It has hidden screws under the bottom corner pieces
  • You still have to pry it open with a screwdriver and mallet
  • The battery is encased in several layers of totally sealed plastic for waterproofing
  • And under that it is podded, 5/6ths encased in rubbery gel stuff so you can’t really take it apart and hack it well.
  • It has 1/4 kWh

For the Ci, our best option to soup it up (as it has fallen out of warranty and parts don’t seem to be readily available!) may be adding a new battery or batteries, which we could do for about $400 per kWh. We could easily fit 2 of those under my seat in the undercarriage basket. Then those could hook up to a new replacement (V)ESC (Electronic Speed Controller) which we then connect to the motor (managing the voltage etc. so it will be compatible).

For the Fi, we were able to access it a bitbetter and Zach, Henner, mjg, and others had a look with digital microscope, logic analyzer, etc. To figure out what is going on with the power management . Zach will describe all that on his hackaday.io page!

three people gathered around an electronics workbench

It was interesting to see the different approaches in play at the various workbenches. The laborious and intensive work needed for detailed understanding and reverse engineering is in some ways a philosophical stance, of learning, reuse, and conservation, but in other ways, a factor influenced by resource constraints. In other words, necessity is the mother of the meticulous teardown! The people with capital, on the other hand, had less patience with this approach and were ready to throw resources at a problem, and use new (or repurposed) stuff to do complete workarounds, or simply throw it all out and invent something new that would be more rapid to get working, even if unlikely to be elegant or refined in the first prototype.

There was a long discussion on how to make a kit to convert manual chairs to power with Justin and Morgan. To that I added some wild eyed ideas but also a pointer to these interesting, cheap, DIY open source wheelchair designs and to Whirlwind Wheelchair. We see people every day in the Bay Area who are struggling with clunky or broken chairs. It is a good topic for future exploration – what other conversion kits are out there? What were the problems and pitfalls? How feasible is it to to come up with a maintainable, cheap, design for such a thing?

I learned during the event that ESC (pronounce the letters in it) is an electronic speed controller (the thing I normally just call “motor controller” with a vague handwave.) VESC, frequently mentioned by our hardware hackers, is a particular technology – or we could call it a movement – that I think looks amazing – for “flexible, efficient, and reliable power systems for your platform”.

Another cool nexus of ideas that came up: Whill chairs come with Bluetooth and a phone app. You can control the chair from the app, configuring it with one of three pre-set acceleration curves. Could we write a new app to communicate with the chair and program it in different ways?

You can also steer the chair from a phone or tablet screen via Bluetooth. I have never actually used this feature. But we can see that airports are starting to explore using Whill chairs on auto-pilot, to take passengers to their gates. Using programmed routes but also LIDAR, like robot cars! That put a gleam in several people’s eyes. Actually, it put a whole range of different and hilarious facial expressions on everyone’s faces!

And as one more note for future investigation: The chairs also appear to log and send diagnostic information to the manufacturer. I’d certainly like to see that traffic! I wonder if it is encrypted and what the heck it is sending!

I’m really looking forward to Grassroots Open Assistive Tech hosting more electronics and hardware tinkering nights, as well as other DIY gatherings!

Overheard:
(just for fun – it was a lively event!)

“I’m so impressed with the fact that you bypassed the VMS…. Expert move”

“….. and then it would explode!”

“That motorcycle [points to motorcycle in a giant pile of e-bikes] has a battery bigger and more powerful than a tesla powerwall. and it goes 160 miles an hour! [gleeful laughter]”

“You can control it via bluetooth? Woah!! That’s my kink!”

“There are no standards for bike wheels, so there are 4 different kinds of 26 3/4 wheels and none of them work with the others!”

(Justin): “I’m gonna take your 1/4 kWh battery and give you THREE kWh. We can just strap the batteries under your seat.”
(me:) “Oh, great! I’ve always wanted to be launched into fucking SPACE with my ass on fire!”

“Is this illegal?” “No surely not!” “Well, maybe? But we’re just taking things apart, and looking at how it works! How can that be illegal?”

(FYI: This can be a complex question! You may want to read this Coder’s Rights Guide from EFF as a starting point. )

More pics from the event:

Thanks to everyone who showed up, chatted, tinkered, and especially thanks to our congenial hosts, General Lithium – they are a battery tech company, but they also have a nonprofit wing that runs this maker/coworking space in the heart of San Francisco. Have a look at their events page and membership information!

Leave a Comment