This week, I got my hands on more solar panels. In particular, a battery charging solar panel.

After taking it apart and looking at its quite old and confusing circuitry, I was led to research voltage regulators. From my research, I found there are 2 main types: a linear regulator and a switching regulator. I found a lot on how they work and which type would be better suited to my needs (a boost switching regulator, which provides a higher output voltage than its input voltage), but I struggled to find much information about building them.

So, I went to our technician, Bevis, and we came to the conclusion that he could help me with it, but it would mean that it would become the main focus of my project. Making it more of an electrical engineering project. So I needed to decide whether to go down that route or to buy one and focus on the other elements of my project. As I had already invested a lot of time and effort into the mechanics of solar panels, I decided I wanted to have a go at building the voltage regulator myself. I also found it appealing to dive deeply into a topic and learn something new.

Coming to the end of week 2 for this project, I felt like I hadn’t made enough progress compared to my peers, as I didn’t have anything physical to show yet. But Diana reminded me that I’ve learnt and experimented a lot, which is the bigger goal of this project, rather than having a full working product.