Coastalbeat.com

While heading in for a some drinks at Miller's Ale House, shopping out around the Bass Pro Shop, or leaving the latest Seth Rogan flick from the Gulf Coast Town Center movie theater, if you ever catch yourself off-guard in seeing a rickety, solar-powered golf cart whiz by you, don't be too surprised: you've just seen a self-labeled redneck engineer make his way to Best Buy and beyond.

21-year old Richard Shillington, a Business student of FGCU, isn't shy about his creations or his talent in creating sustainable technologies out of anything he can get his hands on. As his most public projects can demonstrate, Richard's pride in his creativity is well deserved. “I don't see what [electronic things] are, I see what they could be,” he tells me while showing off his energy-saving go-kart and bike. His work involving electronics and technology are life-long passions.

Richard's go-kart was the second variation of this project, the first of its kind can be found in pieces resting in the closet of his apartment. After obtaining 50 DC batteries from the liquidation sale of a local Sharper Image, he bought a couple of toy electric scooters and began work on the sun-powered transport. He ripped out an underclocked engine from one of the scooters and found a cheap, used go-kart to plug it into. Afterwards, he overclocked the engine to twice its power, and the drive was connected to a fifth wheel on the back of the kart.

However, that's only half the story. After that, he built a second-story on the golf-kart, creating a make-shift roof where the rider sits. On top of the roof sat a long solar panel, that was connected to the five or six batteries powering the machine. Richard bluntly pointed out the problem he experienced with the roof early on in his construction: “It flew off when I hit the brakes.” So, always the innovator, Richard instead set two solar panels leaning into each other, in some sort of triangle shape at the rear of the go-kart right behind the rider. After adding a couple of electric switches, and a shoddy brake-system to stop the thing, he still plans on more for this machine: he rarely stops building any of his projects, and he's never planned on building the same thing again.

“I'll never build the same thing twice, cause there's no fun to build it again,” Richard says. “And I'm never done with a project either.”

This go-kart has the look of an awesome wreck waiting to happen: an adult-sized rider like Richard and I have to fold our legs onto the kart or just hang them out on the sides in order to get moving, turning the steering wheel too far left or right puts the rubber-tires grinding into the go-kart frame, and he doesn't suggest using the brakes for any prolonged use, either. Needless to say, this fun piece of green-tech isn't street legal, and Richard does not dare take it farther than the parking lots of Gulf Coast Town Center. But he does have plans in trying to integrate the small transport into his car as a separate, driving engine. After one early morning test session at 3 a.m., he's had some progress in making it idle down his apartment's parking lot.

Even though his go-kart is restricted to the back streets of a local shopping center and the parking lots outside of his home, Richard didn't let that stop him from finding a way to do his daily commute. In spite of that, he built himself a solar-powered bicycle to pair up with his first machine. It is designed and works in a very similar way to the go-kart. However, one thing that Richard has had trouble with is one obviously unreliable factor, the weather. But it hasn't been a total failure:

“Depending on the sunlight and some stuff like that, the bike will charge up full in about a day, outside. The go-kart will charge full in about three days,” he said. “The bike has shaved off about two minutes from my daily commute, because I don't have to deal with traffic and parking. And I think I've lost a few pounds since I've started using that regularly.”

This interest and drive in constructing some sort of sustainable-energy-source, personal vehicle is deep-rooted in his passion for “Green” jobs and environmentally-sensitive industries. But that's only one side of his tech-life. Richard also serves as a beta-tester for a number of very powerful consumer-technology companies and has received recognition in the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair of 2005. His project involved a theoretical never-ending power supply that depended on motion to recharge itself with energy; he tried to explain it to me like this:

RICHARD: “Do you know anything about physics?”

ME: “Sort of...”

R: “Do you know about mag-level trains.”

M: “Uhh...”

Apparently, my low-toned groan of a incompetence gave him a sign that he's already lost me, and then he moved on to explaining how he put magnets into a PVC pipe, tied copper wire around the pipe, and wrapped duct-tape around the product. And that's what gave him a $10,000 MIT grant, an interview with famous childhood-science hero Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Apparently, when Richard believes he's finished something with real profitability, he does the same thing that any inventor would do: patent it. “When I'm done with a project, I get rid of it,” he said. He's done that exact thing with his private work on a hybrid system for his car, which has been a large success.

As we're finally finishing up the interview, I get down to asking Richard, the redneck engineer, what's next. “I'm going to add some servos to the go-kart and see if I can make it remote-controlled, like a toy R/C car.” I was embarrassed to ask him how: by using parts from an animatronic “Elmo” doll from Sesame Street.