So I am in advanced stages of launching a crowdfunding campaign (
https://experiment.com/chemprint) and was looking on advice from the folks here since you guys have seen it all. In all my years watching crowdfunding campaigns promise the moon and under-delivering, I have tried to be very conservative (and honest) about the goals.
I am a chemist at one of the federal agencies in my day job and very passionate about citizen science and in my free time, one of my major focus is developing citizen science tools for identifying chemical pollutants in drinking water. This is a huge issue not just in developing world, but also in US.
We developed screening level home-based test based on SPE/TLC for identifying pollutants in water using a platform about the size of a humidifier, which has a water aspirator, vacuum flask, TLC developing chamber, TLC spray chamber and a visualization chamber with UV lamps, the project page is
www.analyzechemicals.com and we are going to perform its validation with a larger user base at a local university here (University of Georgia). All of this is easier than itching your own PCBs (though no one does that in this oshpark era).
I have also written a blog post on how to make your own prototype now itself (
https://experiment.com/u/sy5Inw) however, I have laid out the reasons on why folks should back us.
I will appreciate if you guys can look at it and give me any opinions, or things we can elaborate on, or some additional reward tiers. I wont mind if y'all are tough and honest about your opinions, I know I have always been especially at other crowdfunding campaigns!!