SunnyDay Team Starts Crowdfunding Campaign To Support Solar Hackers
The team behind the SunnyDay international solar challenge has started an Indiegogo campaign to develop open-source solar solutions.
Open-Source Solar? DIY? Yes!
The SunnyDay international solar challenge is all about developing open-source solutions for using solar energy. The team behind the event believes that open-source energy solutions promote energy freedom and sustainable development. In other words these guys are working so that anyone can download blueprints and documentation from the Web and build his/her backyard solar power plant.
Developing solar solutions requires hackers, engineers, makers, and tinkerers. In 2014, such people gathered for the SunnyDay hackathon, producing some cool designs of solar concentrators. This year, SunnyDay has grown bigger, becoming an international solar challenge and aiming to make co-designing more attractive to hackers. And yes, it has launched an international crowdfunding campaign to gather a good financial prize for the best hacker teams.
Reward The Hackers
It is often the case that the best open-source solutions are developed by small teams without much attention from a bigger crowd, and it may take years before they hit mainstream. And the teams are often very limited in their ability to experiment due to financial limitations.
The SunnyDay team is committed to changing this. “We think it is important to celebrate tech creativity, desire to share the knowledge on using renewable energy. And we need to support the hackers in their very early attempts to create technologies which everyone on this planet can use. And this is exactly the reason why we started our crowdfunding campaign – we just want to reward best of them for the great work they are doing,” says Andrij Zinchenko, one of SunnyDay’s coordinators and cofounder of NGO EnergyTorrent.
The organizers of SunnyDay are already thinking about combining solar concentrators with a range of various other technologies – steam turbines/engines, Stirling engines, and even absorption chillers. All of those are parts of a larger picture — a whole ecosystem of solutions for using renewable energy that they plan to build.
Every Contribution Matters
It is quite clear that the SunnyDay team is not just crowdfunding. In fact, they are also building up an international network of supporters and co-developers who are ready to spread the word and show others that they can build devices for using solar energy by themselves. So, use the chance, support open-source energy technologies!
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