More fun news! I’d been working over the course of last month with Mouna Andraos, Jennifer Broutin, and Carmen Trudell at Eyebeam on ideas for the Alternative Energy Workshop (which went down on June 23rd), and from it came a killer idea: the personal powerPlant. People were coming to take the workshop in hopes of getting a better idea of how to work with sustainable energy, and what better way to show people how it all comes together than have them build a lil’ personal generator, right?
Equipped with a solar cell, a hand crank and a battery, each unit was designed to give users a real-life example of how solar and kinetic energy is collected, how batteries work, and how their individual contributions could make a difference. A simple circuit was designed and parts were ordered/created so that the participants of the seminar could come in, listen to a few talks on the subject, and then get crackin’ — and while I sadly had to miss the workshop, I’m told they got to do just that.
The finished product looked like this:
(It looks all nice because of Mouna, Jenny and Carmen’s work, I can’t take ANY claim on that one.)
And here’s the super-pretty circuit diagram:
Better yet, Jenny put it up on Instructables, where the feedback seems to be really good so far. Very, very cool documentation on it too. Hope it wins them the laser cutter! Heh. There’s a really sweet writeup on Jenny and Carmen’s blog too, so check that.
There’s apparently more workshops in the works, so we’ll see what neato stuff comes from that, but so far, good things!
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