Tax-Deductible Donations (Raft Foundation)

Posted on by
Reply

We’re happy to announce that US donors can now make tax-deductible donations to Eco-Libre!

Eco-Libre Tax-Deductible 501(c)(3) Donations

Eco-Libre has partnered with the Raft Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit in NYC, to receive charitable contribution donations from US donors.

About Eco-Libre

Eco-Libre is a volunteer-run project that designs libre technology for sustainable communities.

Eco-Libre’s mission is to research, develop, document, teach, build, and distribute open-source technology that sustainably enfranchises communities’ human rights.

– Eco-Libre’s mission statement

We aim to provide clear documentation to build low-cost machines, tools, and infrastructure for people all over the world who wish to live in sustainable communities with others.

About Raft

Screenshot of the Raft Foundation page on Open Collective, showing many collectives, including Eco-Libre
Eco-Libre is one of 37 different collectives hosted by Raft Foundation

The Raft Foundation is a US-based 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor that brings communities together to support neighbors in need through:

  • collective care,
  • community technology,
  • movement infrastructure, and
  • societal transformation

As a fiscal sponsor, Raft provides administrative services to numerous projects (like us!). This, among other benefits, allows the projects that they sponsor to accept tax-deductible donations, if they align with Raft’s founding principles:

  • Resilience: ‘we will endure together and emerge stronger’
  • Autonomy: ‘each by our own choice’
  • Fullness: ‘toward dreams of abundance’
  • Transparency: ‘with nothing to hide’

We look forward to our partnership with Raft to build libre technology for communities that transform society, making them more resilient, autonomous, and sustainable.

Donate

You can make tax-deductible donations to Eco-Libre in your local fiat or preferred crypto-currency.

Donate

eco-libre.org/donate

You can also make tax-deductible cryptocurrency donations directly on raft’s website.

Join Us

If you’d like to help Eco-Libre reach our mission to enfranchise sustainable communities’ human rights with libre technology, please contact us to get involved 🙂

Please enter your email address below for updates from the Eco-Libre Team.

Life-Line v2025.10 Released

Posted on by
Reply

We’re happy to announce the release of the Eco-Libre Life-Line version 2025.10.

Eco-Libre Release Announcement Life-Line v2025.10

This release concludes the manual merge of the contributions from volunteer Jack Nugent. It includes CAD designs for the self-cleaning, raw surface water intake and sphinx documentation.

🛈 Note: Just want to build it?

This article describes a historical "release" of this project (a snapshot in time of our CAD designs and documentation).

If you just want to know how to build it, see the project's documentation

• eco-libre.org/p/life-line

Introduction

Part of the difficulty in completing this merge was the fact that the Eco-Libre Life-Line’s intake system includes expanded metal as a support structure and a fine mesh for preventing debris from entering the raw water intake drum.

Screenshot of FreeCAD application shows an HDPE drum cut in-half with a sheet of expanded metal atop it
Original Expanded Metal (104 MB)
Screenshot of FreeCAD application shows an HDPE drum cut in-half with a hatch plane atop it
Hatch Expanded Metal (0.1 MB)
We were able to reduce the MemSize of our Life-Line’s Expanded Metal Mesh from 104 MB to 0.1 MB by simply replacing the Expanded Metal Mesh with a transparent solid and a Hatch

Modeling these materials in FreeCAD caused the MemSize to bloat, crashing FreeCAD. In the past month, Eco-Libre founder Michael Altfield published two articles that described the process to isolate these troublesome objects and how to optimize them with a Draft Hatch. These optimizations (as well as simplifying objects like threaded bolts pipes, valves, and steel angle) reduced the total MemSize from 114.8 MB to 1.02 MB.

Continue reading →

Optimizing Expanded Metal Mesh in FreeCAD

Posted on by
Reply

This guide will show how to model sheets of Expanded Metal in FreeCAD, without slowing (or killing) FreeCAD.

Optimizing Expanded Metal in FreeCAD

In our last guide, we looked at how to get a granular view of the size (in bytes) of each layer in a FreeCAD file — so we could figure out which object was causing the file to be so large and slow. We found that 90% of the file’s (uncompressed) MemSize was being caused by just one item: a 95 cm x 68 cm sheet of Expanded Metal.

A photo of a small sheet of expanded metal
Expanded Metal (source). Expanded metal is a type of sheet metal which has been cut and stretched to form a regular pattern (often diamond-shaped) of mesh-like material (source)

Unfortunately, rendering mesh objects (like Expanded Metal) in any CAD software can cause enormous lag in the app.

This article is part of a 3-part series:

Continue reading →

Troubleshooting Large FreeCAD File Sizes

Posted on by
Reply

This article will show you how to find out exactly which layer is causing your FreeCAD file to balloon in size, by getting a granular list of all of the layers in your document tree, sorted by size.

Troubleshooting Large File Sizes in FreeCAD

This article is part of a 3-part series:

Context

Recently, we had a volunteer who made some very helpful contributions to the Eco-Libre Life-Line project — an open-source design for raw water intake, filtration, and storage system for sustainable communities.

The original file was 812 KB. After the changes, the file was 17 MB (compressed). And — worse — manipulating the objects in FreeCAD was now very slow and choppy (spoiler: the uncompressed size was 114 MB).

Before merging the updated objects into our GitHub, I figured that some optimizations could be made to reduce the file size — to make opening the file in FreeCAD much smoother. But which object should I focus on optimizing?

Sorting layers by size

You can see the size of each layer by pasting a small python snippet into FreeCAD’s python console.

Continue reading →

2024 Annual Report

Posted on by
Reply

This Eco-Libre 2024 Annual Report will discuss the state of the Eco-Libre project at the end of 2024 and the progress we made throughout the year 2024.

Eco-Libre 2024 Annual Report
Continue reading →

Vegan Communities in Ecuador

Posted on by
4

🇪🇸 Lea este artículo en español

This article will list many vegan communities in Ecuador.

[Vegan Communities Map of Ecuador]

If you’re backpacking through Ecuador or you’re looking to move to Ecuador and searching for a like-minded community, this article is for you.

Map of Veg*n Communities in Ecuador

Continue reading →

2023 Annual Report

Posted on by
Reply

This Eco-Libre 2023 Annual Report will discuss the state of the Eco-Libre project at the end of 2023 and the progress we made throughout the year 2023.

Eco-Libre 2023 Annual Report
Continue reading →