| Agreed that AWGs, especially vapor-compression systems, aren't exactly mind blowing technology, but I'm excited for this for a different reason: I really like the idea of having open source infrastructure. I would like to see people build open source electric vehicles, farming robots, membrane bioreactors, etc. For the naysayers, at least two of these are already a thing:
https://www.osvehicle.com/
https://farmbot.io/ Let's see how far these things get. Open source software has come a long way but there's a whole host of challenges with open source hardware projects which we haven't solved yet (open source toolchains for designing said hardware, open standards for modularity, collaboration tools, etc.). The only way we're going to overcome these challenges [and discover the ones we don't know about yet] is to try it. To that end, I'm glad that this project IS relatively simple -- I think that increases its chances for success, especially considering that this is uncharted territory for most of the team members. Moreover, there does seem to be a market for these things:
http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/global-at...
and I would expect that the cost of energy should eventually go down as we develop less naive means for generating energy. I'm all for it. Work that dehumidifier. TL;DR
The meta problem of open source hardware is interesting in and of itself. |