We hope to go from these low cost kits to home kits, to commercial kits. Out technology will always be open source. We hear you and we want to get there. We definitely want to live good lives - and have those who work with us have good lives too - but we really don't care about being rich.
We are going to start a work coop soon to build and sell the educational kits, as soon as we finish with the initial development. We also have a Hardware X paper coming, showing the initial results of the DIY kit. Things are slowly coming together, but it takes a while since we're literally doing these experiments in our houses.
I am the author of the blog (chemisting.com), working on the project with Kirk and Josh.
The Coulomb efficiency of a device with a microporous, non-selective membrane depends fundamentally on how fast you charge/discharge it, as the device self-discharges while it runs. The faster you charge/discharge, the higher the CE will be.
In the case of the photopaper device, it will be in the 85-90% range when charging to high SOC values at 20mA/cm2. The big advantage is that microporous membranes are really cheap and they still work even if dendrites pierce them. I must me clear that photopaper is meant as a DIY demonstration, a commercial unit would never use that but a polyethylene microporous separator - such as Daramic - with these memrbanes the CE and EE tend to be higher.
We are going to start a work coop soon to build and sell the educational kits, as soon as we finish with the initial development. We also have a Hardware X paper coming, showing the initial results of the DIY kit. Things are slowly coming together, but it takes a while since we're literally doing these experiments in our houses.