From Sept 2022 to August 2023, I was visiting collaborators in Africa, India, and Nepal. I kept a blog of my personal, technological, and professional experiences.
It may be instrumental to see the end of the blog, return to California, where I try to summarize what we’ve learned.
Particular accomplishments are ways to build electric heaters (Ethiopia with Goytom, July 12 in Nepal), and construction with concrete (Uganda with Andrew and Crevan; Togo with Salma, Zambia with Clement).
Presently, we have 5 research students working full time at Cal Poly working on concrete construction and power optimization:
- Vibrating the concrete improves strength and surface smoothness. We are using a $50 body massaging “gun”, but many other methods could also work. We will have updates here and on the blog, and look forward to publishing the results.
- We are testing a power optimizer that consists of fewer than 15 components with a total cost of less than $2. Details to follow.