Coffee and SOLAR Power

Tyler Wilson is a True Entrepreneur Corps 2012 Fellow. A senior at Tufts University in Boston, Tyler is a Mechanical Engineering major and aspiring entrepreneur. Tyler is spending his summer working with True company Coffee & Power, and shares some of his experiences with us below:

Our founder Philip can be described as a bit of a mad scientist (in the best possible way), and after he learned that I was a mechanical engineer he was kind enough to bring me upstairs to his “secret lab.” He explained that he had recently gotten several flexible solar panels in the mail which he hoped to combine with a wireless hotspot to create a sort of mobile workspace for C & P users (and the employees when we are looking to get out of the office). Of course, I was intrigued, and a few weeks later this has been a side project I have worked on pretty consistently. The system essentially draws power from the sun which is then used to recharge a car battery in the circuit and power external appliances. The power flowing through the whole system is monitored by the charge controller, and then passed through an inverter which converts the DC power from the panels into an AC signal that can be used by household appliances. In my first week I took the setup outside with Philip and wired it up and we were happy to see some juice flowing! Since then it has gone through a bunch of revisions.

The next round of testing involved my coworker Becky and I taking the system out to Duboce Park, where we set it up amongst the tanners and frolicking dogs. When it was all powered up I was happy to see the wireless come online without any issues and when I Skyped back to the office everyone was pretty excited. We got a bunch of questions and people seemed to think the idea was awesome.

After realizing that the whole setup was very annoying due to the amount of stray wires present everywhere I took it upon myself to create a more modular design. This was accomplished by mounting both the charge controller and the inverter to a 20”x30” piece of plywood. With these two pieces together I was able to greatly shorten the wires connecting them and also permanently install the battery’s alligator clips into the inverter. The next step in improving the system is replacing the old marine deep cycle, lead acid battery. For this type of battery, it is unsafe to completely discharge and recharge it and it can only absorb energy to charge at about 75% efficiency. To replace this piece of the system we have decided on a Lithium Ion battery which will be able to endure many more charging/unloading cycles and also absorb the solar energy at about 97% efficiency. In addition, it is a lot lighter at just 14 pounds and will make the transport/assembly of the system all that much easier.

The Holy Grail: Working From the Beach

As I am writing this post I am actually sitting under a canopy at beautiful Baker Beach (not the nude part, although I did take a walk….) We took the solar rig out, as a company, to spend the day working on the beach with the sound of cascading waves to soothe our stress. I have to say I was a little nervous about the tides, wifi coverage, wind, dogs, kids etc. but it has been a great day! We have gotten a lot of questions and people seem to think that this is an incredible idea and that Coffee & Power would be an awesome place to work. Can’t argue with that, here’s a picture of our “office.”

Sitting in on focus group testing

While I have had a lot of fun with the solar rig I have also been doing some more marketing stuff.  Last Friday I was fortunate enough to sit in on the C & P ambassadors meeting, a sort of focus group created for the purpose of evaluating the app. The participants were interesting: 3 guys from Paris who had started an app company out here, a lifetime computer programmer, some product development people, and a guy who worked 4 programming related jobs, and the nations #1 Task Rabbit of the last 11 weeks. Again it was great feedback – but some of it was pretty tough. Some of the features of the app seemed either confusing or not very useful to them, and this caused us to reconsider the importance of some of them. The future direction of C&P may be changing a bit in the future, so stay tuned for more updates soon!

(Reprinted from the TEC blog with Tyler’s permission.)