Thank you so much to everyone who donated! Because of your generous support, we're already 1/3 of the way to our goal!

We had a great time making our video and wanted to share some of the priceless moments and memories from our outtakes!

All the best,

the SmartTree Team

Thanks to your support, we're almost halfway to our goal! None of this would have been possible without your generosity. We have had help from many people along the way, including the Northwestern student groups Concrete Canoe and Students for Ecological and Environmental Development (SEED).

The benches that surround the SmartTree will be made primarily from concrete. Students members of Concrete Canoe have been instrumental in helping us with choosing a material and figuring out how to create the molds to shape the concrete. In order to incorporate sustainability into the seating area of the SmartTree, we turned to SEED for help. A leader of SEED suggested that we use upcycled plastic bottle bricks to form the interior of our benches. These are plastic bottles densely stuffed with plastic grocery bags, and not only do these bricks reuse plastic waste, but they also decrease the amount of concrete needed to fill the mold of the benches.

We have enjoyed collaborating with Concrete Canoe and SEED, and look forward to our continued partnership as we start building the SmartTree.

Part of SmartTree's goal is to involve the Northwestern community in sustainability, and one way of doing that is to spread the word about our renewable energy SmartTree. With 18 days still left in our campaign, we'd like to encourage you to continue sharing our page with others so that we can keep up the momentum needed for SmartTree to become a reality.

Thank you again for your support!

In the Press

Thank you to everyone who has donated to SmartTree so far! We are thrilled to have gotten past 50 percent of our goal and are currently almost to 60 percent. As a thank you, we wanted to share with our community of supporters some of the articles that have been written about SmartTree over its history. The kind of enthusiasm we've received from both donors and journalists really complement each other!

This past fall, Medill students named Preetisha Sen and Alex Furuya wrote a piece on SmartTree for North by Northwestern Magazine. To get insight into our project, Alex attended some of our meetings and even came with us into the shop as we worked on prototyping a bracket for one of the solar panels. You can read his piece here!

SmartTree has also bee featured several times on IBM's Students for a Smarter Planet Forum. The first post, by site manager Wendy Murphy, talks about the inception and purpose of SmartTree. Then SmartTree team member Connie Gu has been posting updates periodically, tracking our progress.

Thanks again for your support, and stay tuned for more updates!

We are so grateful to all our donors this week for their support, and we are thrilled to be almost 75% funded! Entering the final week of our campaign, we won a three-day donation challenge and a one day social media challenge from the Northwestern Alumni Association and won a total of $750 in Prize money! This weekend, we're in the running for an additional $750 with another round of donation and social media challenges, so if the competitive spirit strikes you, please share the link to our campaign on Twitter or Instagram with #NUCatalyzer and encourage your friends to donate!

Since we've been hard at work finishing strong with our campaign, we thought it would also be really appropriate to share what our hard work has looked like since the beginning of SmartTree. Many thanks again to all our donors, SmartTree would not be possible without you.

An Iterative Mechanical Design

SmartTree was started when Engineers for a Sustainable World came across some unused solar panels in 2013. Not wanting to waste an opportunity to be sustainable, an ESW subgroup called the Clean Energy Project brainstormed possible uses for these solar panels. It was finally decided that we should create a solar-powered studying station for students to use, and thus SmartTree was born.

The first design featured gently bending branches, the tallest of which stood eighteen feet high. The bracket holding the solar panels to the branches was designed by a freshman group in the Design Thinking and Communication class.

Over the summer of 2014, SmartTree enlisted the help of a mechanical engineering student, Allie Salomon, to help with the safety analysis of the SmartTree design. Allie took materials, wind speeds, and snowy weather into consideration to calculate values of deflection, bending, and internal stress. From her calculations, we discovered that this initial design was not feasible. Allie was able to design a new bracket for the solar panel to improve the safety of the structure, and made suggestions on how we could improve the structure.

That following fall, SmartTree got to work redesigning the mechanical structure in Solidworks. Our current design is much shorter than the original and has a concrete “trunk” surrounding the metal branches. Both of these design changes offer the structure more support, and the rearrangement of the solar panels increased the amount of solar energy that could be captured. We’re currently working with Northwestern professors to ensure every part of our design fits within our safety parameters.

An Iterative Electrical Design

For the electrical design, we worked closely with the NU Solarcar team to come up with the bare-bones of our current electrical system, which involves power electronics, including maximum power point trackers, DC-DC converters and a battery management system. However, as we progressed with our design, we added more features suitable to our applications. In order for users to plug in their cell phones and laptops, we added an inverter and a USB hub; in order to monitor the systems operation and raise people’s awareness on renewable energy, we incorporated a LCD display into our design to show the instantaneous energy generation.

After we had the big picture in mind, we started to prototype the individual parts. As an example, our battery management system involves a battery monitor unit (BMU), which collects sensor data from the battery, and microcontroller unit (MCU) which processes the data and makes certain decisions. Right now, we’re working on programming the LCD screen to display the data collected by the BMU and our future will include adding a Wifi module to the system so that we can connect SmartTree to the internet and remotely access the tree with our personal devices!

After an exciting campaign, we have met and exceeded our $10,000 goal! This is incredible and a huge leap for our team, and we at the SmartTree project wish to send our deepest thanks to everyone who either donated to or shared our project.  We could not have done it without you.

We have such a vision for the tree's construction, and one of our friends at Michigan State University, Jenna Culliton, helped us to give you a little taste of our vision.  These first sketches are a great representation of what we see in the future, and if you have any interest in our project or ideas about how to make it better, let us know!

Our team will be updating this page with our progress, but if you want to learn more, please check out our Facebook page and ESW@NU's website to see what other ESW projects are doing.

With the school year ending, our next steps are working with our ESW summer fellow to start making some prototypes of the tree to do some physical load testing.  In the new year, we look forward to recruiting new members in the fall who are ready to learn about solar energy engineering and to make a difference at Northwestern.

Thanks again for all of your generosity; the entire SmartTree team is so appreciative of your support of this project.