It is a real honor to have my project selected as a finalist for the 2015 Hackaday Prize. As others have said it would have been incredibly difficult to pick the top ten from the 100 semifinalists. This is especially true when you look at the huge range of projects that were represented. It can't be easy to choose between projects that try to solve such a wide range of problems. One project may be much simpler than another, but it may be done very well. Some people are struggling to come up with answers to problems that are incredibly complex, while others are working to create rock solid products along a much more well tread paths. There is also the added complexity of the huge range of individuals or groups that have taken part. Some projects have been taken on by groups that are working on there projects as professionals, or as a businesses, some as loosely affiliated groups of individuals that only know each other through this contest, some who are working completely by themselves, and everything in between. I don't really know how you would weigh those factors for a competition like this. Is the competition only about the product or idea that comes forth, or is there any consideration for the story of how everything got built.

I am thankful for the competition because without it I would not have finished the vehicle, or at least got it to the point it is now. There are simply way to many other things going on in my life right now. My wife and I are expecting our first child in late December, so my wife just had to fly back home to Australia, because she couldn't fly later in the pregnancy. I am staying in South Sudan for another month to try and set things up for when we come back early next year. We are trying to move to Yida refugee camp on the border to North Sudan to work with the almost 100,000 refugees from the Nuba mountains that live there. Yida happens to be one of the least accessible places on the planet. It is only accessible by road for several months of the year in the dry season, and even then the road is so dangerous it is only traveled by armed convoys. Food is airdropped to the camp, and people get in and out via a dirt airstrip.

I am hoping to travel up to Yida early next week, and take the solar utility vehicle with me. It should be a pretty interesting trip. I am going to load up the SUV along with tools and materials into the back of a heavy truck I have been fixing over the last few weeks. We will drive the truck to the capitol city Juba where I have some contacts with some Russians who fly an old Antinov cargo plane up north. I was given an old shipping container up there that I am hoping to convert into a house. It should be a really good test of the SUV as I will be using it as both transport, and as a power source for tools and welding.

It has definitely not been easy finishing up the vehicle, and there is certainly a number of things I will improve in the future, but I am thankful for the competition for keeping me focused so that I could get this thing done. I hope it can help me to work with people here, and inspire others to try something similar. I haven't finished the building plans yet, but I will have several months once I get back to Australia that I can hopefully use to create a set of plans so that people can build their own. I hope the next month of testing will also show me some areas for improvement. This is obviously a very hardware oriented project, which I think makes it harder to open source. It is easy to release a pcb design, or a piece of code. It is just a mater of git commit, git push. With Hardware a lot more effort needs to be put into creating something that someone can gain meaningful information from. As this project is aimed at people in the developing world it requires more than just 3d files as well. This vehicle has been built using a lot of techniques I learned from people I the developing world, but explaining how to hammer out different metal shapes is not an easy or quick thing to do.

I will be adding a number of updates over the next few days, but this is a project that won't end when the competition does. Regardless of the results, I will be continuing to improve the vehicle. Maybe no one else will make one, but I hope that at the very least this project will demonstrate the viability of solar powered vehicles for certain uses. I hope that others will try to improve on these ideas, ad that we can create something that is of real practical use for people in the developing world.

I thought this was a pretty funny picture with the Prado in the background ironically with a dead battery.