The counter-invasion has begun.

Do any of you live in Oregon and have a body of water on your property?

...And do you want an underwater hamster city in it?

It must be at least 8 feet deep, relatively good visibility (Not muddy water) and have nearby access to grid power and wifi (for webcam streaming). This means within reach of an extension cord, so no more than a few hundred feet maximum. If the wifi won't reach that far I can supply a directional signal booster that should do the trick.

The deal is that if I'm going to build a permanent modular colony, I'll need someplace to put it that is on privately owned land with access to the infrastructure it will need to stay under for good. It will be using some small amount of your electricity and bandwidth. We can discuss compensation but ideally participation in this project and having an underwater hamster city in your back yard is what you get out of it. I would visit monthly or bi-monthly, to dive down to the colony in order to add more hamsters and restock it with food/water.

If you find these conditions agreeable and have a body of water on your property that's suitable, please take pictures of it and post them in the comments along with your zip code. If it looks good, I'll contact you for more specific info.

A breakthrough in connecting multiple habitats!

On the recommendation of a clever follower of the blog, I've researched PVC valves, flanges, fittings and flexible duct hosing with which to safely connect multiple habitats while they're submerged. Before, I had imagined a ridiculously overcomplicated system of wirelessly signaling arduinos to open interior O-ring sealed hatches using servos in order to safely "dock" modules to each other while underwater. Way too expensive and fault prone.

The only alternative to this I could see was to permanently mount every enclosure you wanted to be connected to the same rigid, custom milled metal platform so that when you join them with rigid acrylic tubes, there's no stress on the spots where the tubes pass through the hab walls. But this has to be built as one piece, cannot be expanded afterward and would be tremendously heavy. Given that the whole thing would need to be removed from the water every time you want to clean the litter or resupply food and water, this approach is no more feasible than the last.

So, along comes this guy to suggest a better method which is honestly as big of a breakthrough as when I found the ideal ballast pods/weights combo a while back. It will make it possible and relatively easy to join as many habitat enclosures as I have money for, and to resupply food and clean litter without surfacing all of it.

Basically, each enclosure will have a flange mounted to the wall, and a gate valve mounted to that. They are like little watertight doors I can open and close from the outside, by hand, by turning the little knob. The idea is there's one of these on each of the four walls so you can expand from it. The way you expand is by sinking another habitat next to it, screwing one end of the duct hose onto the gate valve (which will need a threaded screw-on fitting for this) then screw the other end of the hose to the gate valve on the other habitat. Then you use a bottle of compressed air to purge the water from the hose interior through a little, sealable opening in the lowest point of the middle of the hose. Once the water's been blown out in this way you can seal both the bottom opening and the little fitting you blew compressed air in through, open both gate valves, and presto the habitats are connected. If this sounds hard to understand, don't worry, at some point I'll do a step by step illustration. Rest assured it's entirely feasible.

How the food resupply/litter replacement works is that the smallest module size (transparent Otterbox 3500 bolted to a ballast pod consisting of a black otterbox 3000 with two 5lb diving weights inside) is used as a swappable food container, and another identical to it but with only litter inside is the "bathroom". Hamsters typically pick one spot to piss and shit, and you can control where that is by putting some of their dirty litter in the spot you'd like them to do their business. So you do that with one of the small modules. Mostly clean litter with a small amount of waste to clue them in to the fact that you want them to use it as a bathroom. When it gets foul enough, you close the gate valves, detach it, swim to the surface with it, and empty it into the trash (keeping a small amount of the dirty litter.) Then you put fresh litter in there, and add the small amount of dirty litter to it. Now you can swim back down to the colony and re-attach this module to it. Presto! Same goes for the food module. Resupplying food and removing waste is now, finally, feasible in a low tech and easily built method. This means I can finally have very large networks of habitats that permanently stay underwater and never need to be surfaced! Incidentally, a small module of the same size as the food and waste modules would be used to transport additional hamsters down to the colony.

The water bottle replacement scheme is even simpler. The hole in the roof that the metal drinking straw/tube passes through is now covered by, for lack of a better term, a stretchy rubber sphincter. The idea is that you can push the water bottle's tube through it and it forms a seal. But also, when you remove the water bottle, the hole in the rubber is tiny enough that bubbles escape but water doesn't enter. You can just quickly swap the empty water bottle for a filled one without ever risking any amount of water getting in.

For the first time, every conceptual piece is in place for a truly permanent underwater colony of any size I'm able to afford. That was never the case before, not the way I thought I'd have to do it. Now, provided the funding, I can easily supply things people have been eagerly asking for: More living space in the form of multiple enclosures linked by tunnels, true permanence to the point that I never have to surface the habitats (except small food/waste modules) once they're in place.

So, which specific parts and why? I've settled on a two inch diameter standard for the hose, valves and fittings so the hamsters can squeeze by one another (Their bodies are about an inch wide). Otherwise even in very short tubes they will sometimes both try to pass through in opposite directions and fight over who gets to pass, as seen in some of the early videos with Hampture Mk.2.5. They are pretty much the Zax, in rodent form. Anyway here's the parts list I've come up with. Won't let me link directly to the specific parts for the first and third items, so I've included the model numers/names for you to plug into ctrl+f.

600-2370 2inch slip socket by slip socket Gate Valve: http://flexpvc.com/cart/agora.cgi?product=PVC-Valves-Gate

Flexadux R-2 PVC Duct Hose, Clear, 2" ID, 0.020" Wall, 25' Length: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0050IGYKW/ref=biss_dp_t_asn

851-020 2inch socket solid flange: http://flexpvc.com/cart/agora.cgi?cart_id=14688260.31875&product=PVC-Flanges-Solid

What I cannot yet find are screw-on male and female threaded fittings for mating the hose to the gate valves. When I've identified that final component, permanently submerged colonies of any size will finally be within reach. I think that's what this is: http://www.amazonsupply.com/dp/B008I4DV2E/ref=sp_dp_g2c_asin
....But I'll need to buy a sample unit to be sure. If it ever gets to the point where I actually have to money to construct a large permanent colony of the type I've been describing, I'll need to find a fan of the blog who lives in Oregon and has a body of water on their property with at least some portion of it that is 8 feet deep or shallower, with nearby access to grid power. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, eh? First things first: Gotta build some modular demonstration habitats to show that this method of connecting them while submerged will work.

Last of the three original hamstronauts has passed away.

I'm sorry to report that all three have now perished from old age. I'd hoped to send them on a last adventure aboard Skyhab before then but they didn't hang on long enough. They've still lived pretty incredible lives for hamsters. :')

Once I can get my hands on enough helium to lift Skyhab, I will invest in the next round of ham hams.

Hello, what's this?

http://www.nsiteck.com/wonderful-ad3828-plastic-dry-box.html

If there's a larger transparent water-tight container on the market, I haven't seen it. Looks like it'd need three ballast pods for a total of 30lbs. This electric heater pad would fit neatly inside on the second floor where air would insulate it from losing heat to the outside water. Should be possible to put together for less than $300. Right now all donations are going to more helium for Skyhab, but if someone wanted to be my secret santa and buy this drybox I'd commit to building a new 2-story Hampture.

"Where no rat has gone before"

The crew of the Hydronaut project, a Czech Republic program to build a two man undersea lab for cosmonaut training, posted this photo on the front page of the Hydronaut website.

The implications are clear. Czech rats have initiated a competing rodent ocean colonization program. But by cunning, ingenuity and strength of will, our American hamsters will win the race to conquer the seafloor, now and for all time. Can rat and hamster share the blue frontier? Or will they build opposing fleets of 1/10th scale submarines, and assault each others' colonies? I feel a Dreamworks film coming on. Or the world's most demented RTS.

(Serious note: I'm sure they only had this set up for a few minutes to take the picture. I do not recommend replicating their design at home. It is open bottomed so the interior is miserably humid. There is no dessicant litter to handle urine or humidity. The weights are on top, meaning it is unstable and would up-end if tipped, instantly flooding. I see no wires so there is most likely no heater. There is also no wheel. If you intend to make your own small animal habitat at home please follow my design for Hambase Alpha. It has benefited from several years of design refinement and is about as close to ideal as a device of this nature can get on a reasonable budget. Doing it the way they did for longer than a minute or two is unsafe and uncomfortable for the animal.)

Update: Hydronaut crew members have contacted me to reassure me that it was only a temporary setup for the purpose of taking the photo. They have also invited an exchange of ideas regarding larger scale projects. 

Hampture: Deep Sea

The technical capability to deploy Hampture to 8 feet has existed for some time. The deep water aquarium pump lists 8 feet as the max depth. Since Hampture equalizes through the seal, the pressure that the pump works against would be more like 7 feet, 3 inches. As I calculated the air throughput for hampture assuming max rated depth, it should still be about 5 times what's necessary with the hab at the full 8 feet.

I did this once, in about 7 feet of water with Hampture Mk. III. As I had only a snorkel and mask, deploying it was miserable, and recovering it was downright dangerous for me. That was part of my motivation to get scuba certified. 7-8 feet is just barely deep enough that, if you're hauling a big heavy object out of water, you're potentially endangering yourself. But with a small scuba setup, deploying and recovering a habitat to/from 8 feet should be much less miserable. As you can see in the diagram below it would be supplied air and power from a floating plastic storage bin, containing one 28ah agm battery, a 175 watt inverter, the 110v->5v2a adapters that power the heated pads, and the deep water aquarium pump. This setup is sufficient to supply air and heat for around 10-15 hours. I expect that I'd deploy it for around five hours, and call it a day. This should be ample time to take photos and video. I've also identified places nearby to submerge it with much, much better visibility (clear water!) compared to the pond I put Mk III. in. It'll be an inland lake or canal, not the ocean, as I need relatively calm water for safety reasons. "Deep lake" doesn't have the same ring to it though.

8 feet is about the point where you feel the need to equalize. Depth doesn't "scale" for hamsters (i.e. just because they're smaller doesn't mean 8 feet to them is like a thousand feet to us or whatever) they experience the same rate of pressure increase by depth as humans. So this is about as deep as I am comfortable deploying them, as the pressure on their inner ear should be gentle, and easy to equalize even for an animal not accustomed to having to do so. For added comfort I will be deploying the habitat very slowly, at the rate of two or three feet per minute, only possible now that I have access to scuba gear. Likewise when I retrieve the habitat: A slow ascent, to allow their eardrums to equalize gently on the way up and to ensure that they don't overexpand their lungs. I expect it will be remarkable to see in nice, clear water, for the habitat which is normally plunked down in a 2 foot deep aquarium to instead be so deep that I have to fully submerge myself to take pictures/video.

As I already have all the parts needed for this, except the battery, it should be doable some time in the next year. And since doing anything more ambitious than this costs exponentially more than what I've done so far, I think once this 'deep sea' mission is complete, I'll call it quits. The Hampture project will then be considered successfully concluded. As the hamsternauts are getting pretty old, I'll be lucky to do this before they die of old age, and combined with the Skyhab project they'll have lived remarkable lives few humans can identify with let alone other small mammals. I'd fashion them some tiny little medals but they'd just eat 'em.