Trying to come up with a design:

​

Looking at designs, a majority of solar portable charger projects consisted of a solar panel, a micro-controller, diodes, a battery, and an USB port. To start off, we began to investigate the simplest portable solar charger we could make and came across the design shown in Figure 1. Once we had an understanding of how solar portable chargers worked, we began to look at more advanced designs that touched on the imperfections of the simpler design (Figure 2) and began to come up with our own ideas. Seeing as the people of Malawi are very poor, we decided to keep the circuit as simple and cheap as possible as the more intricate designs became more and more costly. Thus, we decided to stick with model shown in Figure 3. ​

​

Resources: 

1.) https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=5420817

2.) https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/designing-a-solar-cell-battery-charger.html

3.) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327262942_Design_and_construction_of_a_portable_Charger_By_using_Solar_Cap

4.) http://sharedcurriculum.peteschwartz.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/10/Final-Project-Wiki-Report.pdf

5.) http://appropriatetechnology.peteschwartz.net/cell-phone-charger/