Have you ever wanted to become a self-sufficient hermit, living off the grid and generating all your own energy? Well you can stop drying out and burning your number-twos because here comes AirEnergy 3D.
This Polish crowdfunding project is a compact, portable, and upgradable wind turbine that consists of blades and a base station. Created by the folks at Omni3D, a 3D printer manufacturer, they’ve designed the platform to be modifiable and open source. You can even add new turbine blades by printing them on your standard 3D printer.
“From the very beginning the most important thing for us as 3D printers producer was educating people about the incredible potential of the technology. That’s why we always have special projects running inside Omni3D. We’ve printed prosthetic beak for a penguin that lost it in a fight, we are organizing free and open meetings where we explain the technology to young and old etc. This time the idea was to print something that can deliver more value than the printer itself. Another reason was the need for fully open source solutions in the renewable energy market,” said Konrad Sierzputowski, co-founder of Omni3D.
The kit costs about $350 on Kickstarter although they will open source the plans to allow anyone to build their own turbines. More importantly, they expect to send one assembled kit to a town in need for every £2,500 raised.
The turbine can, in ideal conditions, generate and store 300W of power. This means you can plug in a phone in a laptop or stick the generator into a wall socket and send electricity back onto the grid. While I doubt many of us want to set up a turbine in our back yards, I could see this as a nice, portable system for off-the-grid generation.
Will they mass-produce this product? Sierzputowski isn’t sure: he’s just trying to give something cool back to the 3D printing community. “The Kickstarter campaign will simply make it possible for us to prepare the project and give it back to the community,” he said. “All You need…is wind.”
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