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SPOR: Solar Battery Chargers, USB Cables & Accessories
112.408 $
1.439
Spor: Spread the Power
Featured In:
What is Spor?
Spor is a self-regenerating battery charger for USB devices. It can be charged by an outlet or passively via the sun. It can charge multiple devices at once, and can charge your phone practically as fast as a wall outlet. It's the power of the sun - in your pocket.
What does Spor do?
And it's just the first part of a larger, clean energy revolution
Yea. You need that. We all need that. So back us!
What you get for Backing?
You Can Use Spor when you're...
Socializing
- Talking or texting on your phone
- A late night on the town and your phone is running low
- Out with other friends who need a charge
- Showing off how cool you are around your friends for using solar power
Professionalizing
- In an exciting work meeting and you need your phone for your emails
- In a boring work meeting and can't find anything better to do
- On the go from meeting to meeting with no place in between to charge
Vacatializing
- Camping and you don't have any access to an outlet
- Using your tablet on the plane
Survivalizing
- After a natural disaster that's left you and others without electricity
- After a zombie apocalypse that's left you feeling hungry for human flesh... wait - you're not a zombie are you?!
Living
- Riding your bike around the city or in the woods
- In class and your teacher is giving a boring lecture but your phone's on 2%
- Living in a country with poor access to electricity and your phone is on 2%
How We Made Spor
First we evaluated the market. We found more chargers than we could count but they usually fell into two main groups. 'Too Little' (cheap backup charger or key-chain variety) or 'Too Much" (bulky and expensive)
We think we designed a better one. Here's what went into it.
We designed Spor to be super simple: components packaged in an easy to assemble way. Three components (Battery, Panel & Circuit). But we needed to find the best ones.
So we had to test them...
We found:
- Cells were cheap but too fragile
- Some modules had easy-to-scratch coatings
We Chose:
- A small, monocrystalline module with durable matte epoxy coating
We found:
- Batteries that were too small/weak
- Batteries that were too big/heavy
We chose:
- A 5,200 mAh Lithium Ion battery with built in PCB protection
We found:
- Circuits with solar but only one USB port or circuits two outports butno solar recharging capability
- Electronics manufacturers don't expect their products to be opened but with some finese (force) you can pretty much open anything
We chose:
- A board with 2 outports, inports, solar charge controller, and logic that allows them to work together
In an ever evolving shell
To land on a solid product
That's simple, powerful and universally useful
With great accessories
3D Printability: Why not?
We started out by designing the prototypes of our shells and having them printed by shapeways and i.materialise. Both were awesome! After doing initial tests on our Bukobot 3D Printer, Makerbot Replicators, and a Z-Corp powder printer, we realized these shells weren't half bad! If you don't care about the somewhat rough finish of today's 3D printers, you could print your own shell in whatever color or material you can find.
We believe the future is to let you make it the way you want. That's why we want to give you the option to view our designs or make your own on shapeways and i.materialise to have a beautiful and unique shell that houses great components for your Spor.
And the Ability to Daisy Chain
Why Spor
When you support us you are not just buying a product. You are buying into a larger goal of empowering humanity. Because we all deserve some power when we need t
The Vision
To build this into an ecosystem (Spor, Cables, & Panels) to make energy more accessible and affordable for the global population. Empowering people through technological access. Powering more and more of our energy consumption off of distributed, clean energy networks. Taking a bite out of the fossil fuel grid one device user at a time.
Launch Strategy
Our Team (& Friends)
Founders
Jason Browne (left): Founder and CEO, The Creator of Spor
David Hunt (center): Co-Founder and Head of Marketing, The Soul of Spor
Troy Hudson: Head of Design, The Eye Behind Spor
Adrian Delphia: Chief Technical Officer, The Brain of Spor
Engineering
Adrian Delphia (CTO), Ian Adam, Daniel Stein, Luigi Cervantes, Edric Gracia, Luke Gary, Ross Kessler, Kevin Yueng, Denny Willgoose, Blake Nguyen, Carter Banks and Steve Webb.
Marketing:
Johannes Dzidzienyo (Intern)
FiveFive Collective - they're that good.
Shout Outs
Our Awesome Advisors
Our Awesome Partners
Baiada Institute for Entrepreneurship
Use of Funds
Funds raised through Kickstarter will help us bring Spor to life. We will need to cover upfront costs such as tooling for injection molded shells and minimum order quantity thresholds of suppliers. Spor's bill of materials will need to be tweaked for manufacturing and production engineers will need to be brought on to review the product. Once built, each unit will need to be tested and certified to assure what we have built is safe and reliable. At the end of it all, we will be able to deliver a great product that you helped build.
Stretch Goals
Thank You!
Thank you for helping us bring Spor to the world. Your support is something that we couldn't do this without. Thank you, thank you, we could thank you so much so we'll say it one more time, THANK YOU!
And as always, a special thanks to planet earth.
Riesgos y desafíos
Product Design
The most significant risk in hardware product design is promising something that looks and sounds good but can't actually work. Luckily what we are building, isn't as complicated due to our choice to keep it as simple as possible; no buttons, no OLED screen, no sound-activated wireless charging. In working with NextFab's team of engineers early on, we established a comfort with the circuitry we were building. We feel confident we have designed a product that looks good and functions great.
Manufacturing
People run into manufacturing challenges regularly. With our product, we reached out early to manufacturers seeing if what we could do was feasible and exactly how feasible it would be. We partnered with Dragon Innovation to really get a grip on what the costs would be to build-out Spor and embedded that into how we could bring it to the world. We took that a step further and designed Spor to be modular. Our components aren't super difficult to source and by increasing the quantity; we're able to bring the costs down and increase efficiency in production. We will be involved in the entire process of Spor being built, from the injection molding of the shells to the production of the full unit.
Production & Distribution
Exactly how a product will be produced requires an intense understanding of who is manufacturing components and how they get from the manufacturer to the end user; you. What we did to mitigate the risks associated with production and distribution is source components from specialty manufacturers i.e. we went to solar panel manufacturers for solar panels instead of broad based manufacturers. It's better to be great at one thing than good at many. Through our partnership with Dragon Innovation, we determined the best way was to source the components from individual manufacturers and assemble them into one solid product here in the United States to hire local labor and keep our assembly process in our control. If we are to be held accountable for our own product, we should at least have a clear understanding of how it is being put together.
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