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sudo room Power Cycle 2017: Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Planned start date May 1st 2017.

Now that the Omni has been purchased, we can all feel much better about putting real effort into the building!


We should do a crowdfunding campaign for sudo room. We've never done one. Let's aim for e.g. $25k.



HVAC is probably both the biggest problem in sudo/CCL and also potentially the most expensive to solve.

Air quality

The biggest part of the problem is proper ventilation and air filtering. The air is stale and dusty in sudo room to the point where several folks avoid the space because of it.

Cost: ?


The second biggest HVAC issue is heating from approximately start November to march. The room is nearly impossible to heat and it is likely too crazy to try to solve it with normal HVAC until we split the room into two stories. Any ideas?

Cost: ?


Makes the HVAC operation less energy-intensive.


The direct from above fluorescent lighting is terrible. It gives sudo room a factory floor / warehouse vibe.

The super tall ceilings are hard to deal with since we can't easily bounce light off anything, and we might not want to hang large stuff to bounce the light off since that could block the natural light from the windows. Let's look for creative solutions to this problem. We could hang large diffusers and light them from behind at night. We could build tall structures of organic art that hang down from the ceiling rafters and light up the room. Think of large (but deceptively light-weight) giga-flowers and cocoons growing down from the rafters and providing both real lighting and various mood lighting.

Let's say proper lighting will cost $1k until someone actually calculates stuff.


sudo room would look less like and be treated less like a warehouse if the floor was hardwood. It would also be much less dusty since we could actually clean the floor properly.

sudo room is just under 2000 sqft (about 44 by 45, see this image or the omni floor plan).

Solid bamboo flooring is about $2 per foot. We might be able to get it cheaper but since we probably don't want to attempt to do all of sudo room's floor in one go we might want to choose a brand/model of flooring where there's a high chance we'll be able to get more of the same later.

So, let's say it will cost $5000 to re-floor sudo room. $4k for the flooring and $1k for the underlayment, tools and food for volunteer workers :)

We could do one quarter of the floor in one go or half, depending on how big we want the crowdfunding campaign target to be.

Cost: $1300 or $2500 or $5000 depending on how big a chunk we do at a time.


The acoustics don't seem to be terrible actually but it'd be nice to think about how we can limit noise flowing between sudo and CCL.

We could also mount speakers all around sudo so we can have music or background sounds in different areas to alter the mode. E.g. the default could be Star Trek TNG Enterprise engine hum on all speakers :)

Cost: ?

Partial second floor

It would be pretty great to have a partial second floor, e.g. as a tall mezzanine all the way around sudo room, or even just as a half floor covering exactly half of sudo.

This could be a bunch of pallet shelves from craigslist or it could be a permitted permanent addition which could evolve into a full second floor across both CCL and sudo room with transparent glass (matte or distorting) in parts of the floor to let the natural light all the way down.

If we do just pallet shelves then they definitely won't be wheelchair accessible so we'd have to think about what types of stuff we put on them (ideally a duplicate meeting area or storage area). I believe pallet shelves have to be spaced some distance from the walls to be legal and have some sort of earthquake rating.

It'd be interesting to get an idea what it would cost to get professional contractors to put in a partial second floor (that could be expanded to a full second floor later) and then work towards raising that money with grants etc.