Inspiration
I was once traveling with my family in a car in India. We were warned of the poor lighting and were advised not to travel at night. However, we were close to our destination and went ahead with the journey. Due to poor lighting conditions, we met with a severe accident. I was hospitalized for 6 months and had to undergo surgery. The poor lighting condition was because of no street lights as the grid has not reached that rural part of India. Thus, we are here to solve the problem of highway electrification, especially in rural areas.
What it does
Our product will generate electricity from solar and power the street lights on the rural highways, thus making them self-sustainable.
How we built it
The final product would have servos for each petal and a controllable ball and socket joint. Since we didn't have the exact hardware available, we made use of hobbyist electronics: Arduino to show the 2DOF motion and CAD to provide a proof of concept.
Challenges we ran into
Coming up with a good prototype idea and pooling in the required hardware was difficult. Our initial idea is to attach the servo motor in the video to a real solar panel ( my teammate has it ). However, we didn't have enough time to print a mount to attach the servo to the solar panel. Hence, we turned to LEGO bricks to mimic solar panels.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of our idea, and how many lives it can save after deploying
What we learned
Learned to work with IOTs, do market analysis, and calculate financial protections and ROI
What's next for SunFlower
To build the whole product, get pre-seed round, and make sure that there are no accidents around the world due to poor lighting
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