Jason Skill Log 3: Electronics

What I Learned

I have been assembling the electronics of our piece based on the general layout we came up with last week and I have definitely learned quite a bit more not only about electronics in general but also about solar specifically. I have a bit of experience with electronics but so far everything I’ve made has been in a controlled environment and not really meant for real use. This project, however, requires a design that is more robust and can deal with actual use in the real world. The primary problem is regulating the voltage and current on the board since solar cells are wildly inconsistent in the amount of energy they produce. To this end I have done a bit of research into the existing solutions for solar charging controllers and what would work for us. The best ones seem to be MPPT charging controllers as explained in this video.

This guy has a ton of stuff but this video covers the basics pretty well.

What I Made

I have been focusing on the most basic version of our circuit so far and have refrained from permanently soldering everything together since I’ll need to take it apart later anyways. Despite the many alligator clips and somewhat sketchy wiring it does actually function and outputs the right voltage for charging a battery though it does not currently have enough amperage to actually charge much since I only have 6 solar panels hooked up in a rather inefficient way. Despite this I have learned enough from this prototype setup to begin work on the final design.

No, it wont be nearly this big in reality, thats my blatant overuse of alligator clip connectors.

Connecting it back

Renewable energy is the core idea our project is based on so it’s no surprise that we went with solar as the technological component of our project given its availability and ease of use. We also want to make using our product a good experience and so need to make the electronics simple and robust enough to withstand regular use while not interfering with the aesthetics of the piece. To do this proper engineering strategies and design principals are important, hence the prototype I’ve put together this week being just enough to learn what we need to change instead of jumping in headfirst and making something that only kinda works.