In opposition of some home wind turbines that can exceed $10,000 in price, Poland-based company Omni3D has recently launched a Kickstarter campaign for its AirEnergy 3D. The team hopes to create an easily portable wind turbine that can produce up to 300W of energy, while costing less than $400 to the price conscious consumer. Though it may not be enough power to keep your home running, it’s more than enough to juice up those laptops, smartphones, and other mobile devices.
The upgradable AirEnergy 3D, which is almost entirely assembled via a desktop 3D printer, consists of blades and a base station. At its current development stage, Omni3D has a working proof of concept that can power a lightbulb; however, the squad is working ardently to prepare a model that can output their theoretical 300W of electricity, which would be enough to charge a gadget or several lightbulbs. In order to bring that to fruition, the team is seeking to raise £19.000 (about $31,000) through its latest Kickstarter campaign and intend to make the entire project available to the open source community.
The device can create up to 300W of power that can be stored in a battery for later use or hooked into a home’s wiring to supplement other service. Even better, the final build will include Wi-Fi connectivity, thus enabling the power unit to be managed and observed by an application loaded onto a smartphone. With mobility in mind, AirEnergy 3D can fit comfortably within a backpack and provide power to a multitude of devices on outdoor endeavors, making it a must-have while camping in the woods or basking in the sun on the rooftop.
“Let’s bring clean, mobile and renewable energy to every doorstep around the world,” says Omni3D Co-Founder Konrad Sierzputowski. The team is making the design database open source so anyone around the world can easily build it with the goal of providing clean electricity to poor areas off the grid. In addition, for every pledge of just over $4,000, the team will send a fully operational AirEnergy 3D to an African village.
“From the very beginning the most important thing for us as 3D printers producer was educating people about the incredible potential of the technology,” Sierzputowski tells TechCrunch. “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.”
To learn more or fund the AirEnergy 3D, visit their Kickstarter campaign page here.
