FabLab project Big Bird

Hello, this is the first post on a new project within the FabLab community and beyond. The aim of the project is to invent, design, engineer, test and build a solar evaporation, transport and energy harvesting system.
Main goal is to find a way to bring the collected monsoon water up the hill during the dry season, not using ordinary pumps that run on electricity, but use evaporation of water itself, since water vapor is moving upwards by itself.

It sounds simple, and hopefully it is, but we will find out during the project.

The idea for this project rose during the Fab5 meeting in India (Pune). Close to Pune is the FabLab in the village Vigyan Ashram (www.vigyanashram.com) and one of the improvements they like to have is a better way to get the water up the hill for irrigation and other purposes.

For those who don't know what a FabLab is.
FabLab stands for Fabrication Laboratory, based on an idea by Neil Gershenfeld, and is a local place where digitally controlled machines are made available for a wide public. Look at it as an easy accessible workshop where you can work with machines like lasercutters, milling machines, 3D printers, etc yourself. These workshops try to 'democratize' production means. One of the interesting things about these labs is that nowadays digital drawings made in eg. Inkscape, Coreldraw or Adobe Illustrator can easily be sent to machines that can 'make' the product. These drawings can be sent all over the world, so instead of transporting the products over the world, we only have to send the drawing, since each FabLab has access to the same machines.

Keywords in the FabLab world are: empowerment, open (source), share, bottum-up, knowledge

I hope I can inspire many people to contribute to this project by sharing their ideas, helping each other solving problems during the idea, design test and build phase. Let's see what collaboration on the internet can create in the physical world! LET's GET THE WATER UP THE HILL!