But also because this is a prototype, and they wanted to be able to tinker and measure, there's lots of design features and parts that are quite expensive and not really needed. Assembly also appears to be tricky and time consuming with non-trivial risk of damaging parts that then need to be repaired.
So ultimately you have a design and plan that's neither directly suitable for mass-production or low volume production (which is fine! it's a prototype! it's super not done). The prototype as described would likely form an acceptable basis for further revision.
You could probably go to a mechanical engineering design/consulting/prototyping firm with this and ask them to make it real with minimal changes (removing extraneous measurement devices, maybe swap out some of the grommets). It'd probably cost you like 50k at least to get your first one. Second one probably will cost like 100 bucks range.
Thunderf00t has made a ton of videos about devices like this, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGTRX6pZSns
The TLDW version is these devices are fancy dehumidifiers. They need a ton of power, and lots of air humidity to be practical, which are exactly not the conditions these devices are advertised to operate in.
And even then, the water they produce is dirty, so it needs to be purified and treated to be actually drinkable.
Even if we solve all these challenges, it turns out that doing something dumb and low tech, like transporting drinking water on trucks is actually a lot more efficient.
This is another one in the long list of devices designed to help those hypothetical poor people, like OLPC and the Gravity Light.
It turns out these people have already solved these issues, and much better, usually with off-the-shelf alternatives and a bit of ingenuity.
For example, while I have some viability questions the company Terraformation has been trial'ing photovoltaic solar powered water desalinization (using brackish wells as a source) in deforested areas for water - https://www.terraformation.com/blog/solar-powered-desalinati...
If I understand correctly (still learning and might be wrong), another way to frame this is in perceiving water vapor itself - you can be in desertifying areas and yet supposedly have plenty of water vapor to a lack of evapotranspiration. This is what some have framed 'the second leg of anthropogenic climate change' - ( https://museecology.com/2020/10/30/15-professor-millan-the-s... , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf4jwkhCk_A - "Desert or rainforest" , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdcsQw3ma_Y - "Restoring the Water Cycle 1" )
... a more business-focused GitHub.
... an OpenSea for inventors.
Imagine if money spent on NFTs would go to cool projects instead of avatars!
Open Collective is designed to do exactly that:
Let the investors allocate their money efficiently, rather than buying a gold mine as a movie theatre company (as an example).
That's a pretty random example. Crypto? Maybe. But it's not like AMC is going to randomly get into the actual physical mining busin-- (hold on, it's 2022, lmgt just in case)
Yes, a perfectly good example.
Or if none of that happens, at the very least it serves as a free bit of knowledge telling others going down this path "it didn't work"
If the principle of it is sound, which I cannot verify, then by a manufacturer picking up the idea. Developing it into a product and selling it to individuals.
They are basically saying (paraphrasing) "Hey we suck at manufacturing things at scale, so we won't continue with this idea. But we don't want to let our learnings go to waste. Go ahead and learn from our experiments and mistakes. Maybe one of you out there can make it work as a product."
:-)
Why is it "dystopian" and "co-opting" if a company uses a technology like this to operate in a more environmentally friendly way?
People love to shit on companies (not specific ones, just "big companies" as a concept in general), completely ignoring where our standard of living comes from.
What exactly is a data center by your definition? What individuals (that are entirely disconnected from corporations) need them? How many individuals have personal data centers of such a scale that they would need to produce liquid water on-site for their computing needs?
I genuinely believe you’ve described an entirely theoretical person that doesn’t reside in this universe.
Most modern buildings have at least few racks of compute/storage for services like TV/phone/internet, camera recordings, etc. Even family houses have small racks nowadays.
Ignoring this specific example, a majority of the population uses social media for leisure and online tools for work (email, banking, etc.).
A majority of interconnects between ISPs and networks are hosted in data centres too... so there wouldn't be much of an internet without them.
If you closed all data centres over night, the majority of the above would disappear and certainly would not be able to scale as large as it had without data centres... hence, a majority of people need data centres to maintain their current standard of living.
And considering how highly technical something like a modern water treatment plant can be, data centers are already a major force behind some of our potable water.
>The team aimed to build a highly lightweight, portable, cheap (<5% of user’s income) device that an individual could use to produce 5L of drinking water per day.
Let's say that I'm not an engineer or a researcher or a coder, but would like to set some of these units up to collect water. How do I do so? Do I approach someone to build this for me (who?)? How much can I expect it to cost?
In other words, how can I actualize this vision:
> So the H2E team asked: “What if you could put the power to generate daily drinking water into the hands of individuals, no matter where they live, by creating an affordable, easy to use device that harvests water from the air and is powered by the sun?"