God's Warmth - Solar Powered Electric Blanket

Inspiration

The idea came to me about two years ago while I was sitting in church. I started thinking about how homeless people get heat during the wintertime. It was about to get cold, and I kept thinking about people out there freezing with no heat and no energy. That's where the idea for a solar powered electric blanket came from, and I've been building it ever since.

What it does

God's Warmth is a solar powered electric blanket. It collects solar energy during the daytime and stores it in a battery, and then that battery powers the heating at night. So the sun does the work during the day, and the person stays warm after dark. No outlet, no wall power, no cost to the person using it.

How we built it

I asked my robotics coach for some money to get supplies so I could start building, and she gave it to me. I bootstrapped the rest of it with my own money. I built the entire thing at school and documented the whole process as I went.

Once the first prototype was together, I tested it outside in real conditions, and it worked really well.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest one is cost. Building it is expensive, and if this is going to actually help people, it has to be cheap enough to make more than one.

Safety and weatherproofing were the other big things. This is an electrical device that's meant to be used outside overnight, so it has to hold up to the weather and be safe to sleep under.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I built a working prototype and tested it outdoors, and it did what it was supposed to do. I also found out that someone else had built a similar solar blanket around the same time, and honestly that gave me a lot of hope — it told me the idea was actually good and worth pushing on.

What we learned

I learned how to take an idea from a thought in my head to a physical thing that works. I learned how to ask for what I need, since none of this would have gotten off the ground if I hadn't asked my coach for funding. And I learned that building for people outside is different from building on a desk — the weather, the safety, and the cost all matter as much as whether the circuit works.

What's next for God's Warmth - Solar Powered Electric Blanket

Next is deployment. I want to get these into the hands of people in New York City, and also in places that get a lot of sunlight but still get cold at night, like California. The plan is to build a pair, put them out in the field, test how they hold up, and improve the waterproofing so they're even safer to use.