Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Increased Funding Opportunities and Student Recruitment
For the most part, being a professor is wonderful, but like all jobs, it has its distasteful
parts. Other than grading, the least appealing part of being a professor is the constant hunt
for funding. The increased exposure from sharing open source hardware can lesson this
burden by directly resulting in funding. One of the projects our group has been working
on for several years is investigating the effects of snow on solar photovoltaic performance.
We published our research plans, experimental schematics, protocols, and software on an
open wiki (
appropedia.org
, the largest sustainability-based wiki), which led to our project
page being ranked number 1 in Google searches related to snow and photovoltaic techno-
logy. This exposure resulted in a successful open source partnership being formed among
20 organizations, including more than a dozen companies, all of which directly contributed
funding, equipment, and in-kind support to produce a world-class research testbed called
the Open Solar Outdoors Test Field (OSOTF) (Pearce, Babasola, and Andrews, 2012). The
entire OSOTF was developed on open source hardware principles. In addition to the design
and layout being open, all data and analysis when completed are made freely available to
the entire photovoltaic technical community and to the general public. Data including real-
time photos of the OSOTF (
Figure 16.2
)
are available in 5-minute increments on a live
basis.
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