This caught my eye ... it would be great for the travel kit.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/800343142/worlds-most-affordable-wall-charger-with-built-in
I hope they make their funding goal.
My personal favorite crowdfundie thing is the solar roadways. Roads are made of solar panels which have embedded lights in them that can do different things like make the lines on the road, or light up when an animal walks on them. They also melt the ice on the road so you don't have icy roads.
Oh, and, they are SOLAR panels so they create electricity.
They already are undergoing a test project for the US highway system in Virginia.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/solar-roadways <-- IndieGoGo page
Video showing them in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qlTA3rnpgzU
"The main problem is cost. "Sure, we could pave the streets with solar panels, but we could also pave them with gold,"
I think putting solar panels on unicorns would be more cost effective, might come second on the reddit wish list after solar roads though.
Gold is too soft Mark :)
Cost is always an issue to start with, but the cost of solar panels has dropped to 1/3 of 2011 prices I believe. That drops the cost of power produced massively from when we had ours fitted.
They can always be toll roads, there might be advantages for Google cars, etc. I wonder what the storage is. Thats usually the issue with solar.
mind you my father in law was being sold "solar that works at night" the other day. Salesman never turned up....
As for the charger, not sold on it. I want one without wires. I already have a solar booster. works a treat.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Blue-30000mAh-Solar-Power-Bank-Backup-Battery-Charger-for-GPS-PDA-Mobile-Phone-/371069834174?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item56657c53be
ROI, not cost, is the issue. For the cost of a single nuclear power plant, you can pave a lot of road with solar panels. The question is when the bean counters sit down and run the numbers, which wins, the nuclear plant or the solar roadway?
The thing about a solar roadway is that there is a potential win/win there.
- The state highway department passes the buck on repaving roads. It's now up to the solar company to handle. Huge tax savings.
- The solar company doesn't go out and buy a massive tract of virgin land on which to install solar panels. They get free land in return for maintaining the road.
So it isn't really like paving the streets with gold. We're not going out and paving deserts with gold, but we are paving them with solar installations. So the question is whether the additional incremental cost and loss of efficiency due to putting solar installations on roadways is offset by the cost savings in land acquisition, transmission loss (roads are near where people live, large open deserts, mostly are not), etc.
Obviously, until we start to see real prices for rolling this out, tying it into the infrastructure, actually selling the power in incremental amounts to travelling electric vehicles and tracking that usage and billing for it and so on and so forth, it remains to be seen whether this is a great idea or a space elevator idea (remember how those were going to be so much cheaper than launching rockets).
Personally, I don't see these holding up to snowplows and tire chains very well and I see a lot of problems maintaining enough clarity over time to keep the efficiency up. That said, if they are recyclable and the payback cycle is fast enough, those may be moot concerns.
When I first saw the promotional video of solar roadways I thought it was a cool idea, but I think it makes more sense to put panels on rooftops. Roadways are harsh environments, big trucks crush down on them, they get covered with oil and dirt. It seems like the panels would be much more expensive and take a lot more maintenance than rooftop units.