With Steorn, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Back in April, Steorn opened up membership in their developers’ club, the SKDB, to the public. For the first time, anyone who was willing to pay several hundred dollars up front could find out all of the secrets of the Orbo. The idea, according to Steorn, was that soon many independent replicators would be building their own Orbos and proving to the world that free energy is possible.

That hasn’t happened. According to posts on various forums (such as Energetic Forum and MoleTrap) as well as a video posted by Steorn, one or more engineers may have followed Steorn’s build instructions well enough to produce a device that shows the same pattern of scope traces that Steorn has shown off in demos, which they interpret as representing energy gain (an interpretation that others contest). But the real test, the only measure that matters to anyone other than argumentative engineers, is whether the Orbo can do work. That means light a light, warm a radiator, or lift a weight — anything that actually uses more energy than the device itself started with. As far as I know, no one has claimed to build an Orbo that can do this, yet. That is why I haven’t posted to this blog for several months; lots of people have been blowing smoke, but we have yet to see an Orbo do something.

This week Steorn is pulling back the curtain even further — or renewing their efforts to separate hopeful engineers from their money, depending on how you’d like to look at it. They are now offering for sale the Orbo Evaluation and Development System, an all-inclusive do-it-yourself free-energy starter kit that will let you (if you are an electrical engineer, that is) “prototype and develop products driven by Orbo Technology”. It even comes with a year’s membership to the SKDB, all for the low, low price of only €319 (about $550).

Every few months since 2006 there has been some big new event in the saga of Steorn. But they all really just fall into two patterns. Before April 2010, the story was always “We’ll reveal Orbo — soon.” Since April, the story has been “We’ll reveal Orbo — for a price.” But we still haven’t seen any evidence of Orbo actually doing anything that proves free energy has been produced. In my opinion Orbo will be worth talking about only when, and if, the story changes.