Current Technologies to Harness Solar Energy

There are many technologies that use solar energy to produce electricity or heat in one or the other way. I would like devote this post to describe various photovoltaic solar panels and concentrated solar power.

How to solder?

While making a solar cell phone charger, I came across one problem that prolonged the time of making it. The problem was me not knowing how to solder. As it appeared (oh really?!), soldering process is not as easy as take a soldering iron, warm up wires and connect them together. I honestly thought that this is how the process happens.

Soldering takes practice. This video has a good explanation on how and why solder correctly:

Ready solar cell phone charger

Steps to make a solar cell phone charger

You can view items I used for my solar cell phone charger in this post. I am going to describe steps and  mistakes I did while making it.

1)  Soldered a diode to the positive terminal. Then soldered a wire to the diode. Mistake: I soldered the diode in a wrong direction. I discovered it only when the whole solar cell phone charger was made and it didn't charge the phone. The voltage on terminals under a lamp was 5 and more volts, but voltage in wires was 1.2 volts in every connection spots after terminals. Once the diode was soldered correctly, it started working. Here is an image of my initial soldering: 

How electricity works

The first step before making a charger is to learn how electricity works in general and how solar cell transforms solar energy into electricity. The first 5 minutes of the video below explain how electricity works:

Items necessary to make a solar cell phone charger

Today I made a video of items that I have to make the charger. Check it out: