I know even less about this sort of project than you do. My level of ignorance is shown by taking your claim that you could do it in a year at face value and only thinking about whether you could raise the money.
A test project sounds very reasonable. So does thinking about where you could go for competent advice about the difficulty and the risks of the project turning out badly.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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