Joshua M. Pearce is the John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation at the Thompson Centre for Engineering Leadership & Innovation. He holds appointments at Ivey Business School, the top ranked business school in Canada and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Western University in Canada, a top 1% global university. At Western he runs the Free Appropriate Sustainability Technology (FAST) research group. His research concentrates on the use of open source appropriate technology (OSAT) to find collaborative solutions to problems in sustainability and to reduce poverty. His research spans areas of engineering of solar photovoltaic technology, open hardware, and distributed recycling and additive manufacturing (DRAM) using RepRap 3-D printing. He wrote the Open-Source Lab and Create, Share, and Save Money Using Open-Source Projects.
Authored Comments
Open source space tech is growing fast - in addition to the UPSat project there is also the FossaSat-1, and a host of university-researched CubeSats. To help with that effort we just released an open source fully 3-D printable air-bearing-based attitude simulator for CubeSat satellites: https://www.academia.edu/40617060/Design_and_Testing_of_a_Low-Cost_Open…
Thanks for the great article Jen -- this list is a good start - and I really like Terry's idea of load shifting to match a renewable energy profile. What is clear, however, is that we need to start harnessing OS far more aggressively to save the planet. There should be OS apps for all the major energy savings tips, OS development of renewable energy, OS controls etc. We have a lot of work to do.