Pocket Solar Factory is a project by Alex Hornstein and Shawn Frayne to revolutionize the way small-scale 'picosolar' panels are made. These are the panels used in mobile solar charging--solar backpacks, purses, and phone chargers, these are the panels used in just about every developing world solar product, and these are the panels used in solar streetlamps, solar garden lights, solar highway ref
lectors, and every other application that needs a small amount of electricity. Picosolar panels are currently made, entirely by hand, in thousands of factories around China. The greatest cost in making the solar panels is labor, and the imprecise manual processes mean that about 15% of the panels coming off the line don't work properly, and get trashed. We're making a low-cost, fully automated, tabletop factory that can produce picosolar cells, anywhere in the world. By automating the process, we can significantly lower the cost of these remarkable panels, making them accessible to more people around the world, we can produce our panels ethically, and by making our machine small and cheap, we can produce solar panels locally, anywhere in the world. We want to revolutionize the picosolar industry, and we want to do it right.
