The first prototype built in the new setup works well, the capacitor charges more quiclkly when it does but still not very regulary. Still experimenting with data logging, the ultra low power nature of the experiment makes it hard to know how much current is sunk into the equipment. I use a Picoscope 3206B for this experiment, and the flat capacitor (red) line could be either caused by the current being sunked into the Picoscope or just the operation threshold voltage of the energy harvester which is just above 100mV.  

Both the resolution of the graph and the potential issues of the equipment effect are not great. Right now the best results have been achieved with the least measurements! just letting the energy harvesting do its thing. We are looking at getting a low power measurement equipment that would both work for our tests and not break the bank at the same time, and hopefully increase the power output of the cells to make them less sassy. 

We finally uploaded all the files to github too! more of the electronics to come, right now it's mostly the fuel cell build and the artwork which we published. 

Next time!

We are building a few more prototypes for a few reasons: one is to get more data points, so far each prototype has produced electricity but behaved differently. We want to figure out which step of the build process affects the performances to get a more consistent output. We will also try to chain them to achieve a higher voltage and power output. Finally: there are a few different constructions we want to try and compare. Stay tuned~