Alphabet designed a low-cost device to make drinking water from air. Now it’s open-sourced
The company’s “moonshot factory” is letting anyone build and tweak the design of its new atmospheric water harvester.
Last year, on the roof of a parking lot at Google’s headquarters, engineers from X—Alphabet’s “moonshot factory”—set up a panel to begin its first tests. The design, called an atmospheric water harvester, pulls in outside air, then uses fans and heat from sunlight to create condensation, producing clean drinking water drip by drip.