SipsCo

Research & Development

The department that digs first.

R&D exists to answer one question ahead of the yard: what should the next blend be, and what will it take to get it out of the ground? Everything below is in active trial. None of it is in the catalogue yet.

Field trial

Unit 7 works the night shift.

Our first autonomous extraction unit has been cutting the north face since spring, on a route it revises itself. It does not take breaks, it does not need the lights on, and it has never once asked what the dirt is for.

Uptime is 94%. The remaining 6% is spent waiting for someone to come and empty it.

Unit 7's routines are not a trade secret. The two programs that flatten a pad and sweep a face clean are published in full, test harness included. Read the field report on Unit 7 for how it works and what it structurally refuses to do, or go straight to the Lua source on GitHub.

A white automated mining machine with a diamond pickaxe mounted on its side, parked on a grass field in front of a mossy cliff
Unit 7 between cuts, north face. Pickaxe is consumable and rated for one shift.SipsCo ·
North face · shift of · flattener.lua
=== Turtle Flattener ===
Area: 15 x 15  (225 cells)
Levelling to my current elevation. Nothing below it is touched.
Fuel: 1284
Chest expected directly behind. Ctrl+T to stop.

Layer +0: mined 203
  Inventory full - returning to chest
  Dumped 16 stack(s)
Layer +1: mined 178
  ~ Skipped cell 11,4 (blocked)
Layer +2: mined 121, 1 cell(s) unreachable
  Inventory full - returning to chest
  Dumped 14 stack(s)
Layer +3: mined 44
Layer +4: mined 12
Layer +5: mined 0
Nothing left up here. Done.

Mined 558 block(s). Fuel left: 402

Current programmes

Three things we are working on.

  • Autonomous Extraction

    A small fleet of programmable extraction units works the north face unattended, levelling each pad to the elevation it was set down at and never cutting below it. Each unit returns to the pad on its own, and most of them return with dirt.

  • Material Recovery

    A second unit walks the yard on the hour, lifting whatever the extraction fleet left lying about. It cruises one block above the litter rather than through it, and it does not dig — the only thing it is permitted to remove is what is already loose.

  • Blend Formulation

    The pilot line turns a proposed recipe into a lab-panelled sample in under a day, which is how thirty-four standard blends emerged from roughly nine hundred candidates. Blend No. 0 remains sealed.

Want a blend that does not exist yet?

Wholesale partners can put a formulation request straight to the department. We will tell you honestly whether it is soil science or a landscaping problem.

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