Welcome to our Imperial College, EEE group project website. For our group project we were assigned the task of designing a product that tackled the issue of "bridging the digital divide".

The electricity supply from the grid in rural parts of India can sometimes be inadequate and unreliable. We believe solar power to be a suitable means to power the computers as India receives about 300 clear sunny days in a year. This is equal to over 5,000 trillion kWh/year, which is far more than the total energy consumption of the country in a year. The daily average solar energy incident over India varies from 4-7 kWh/m^2, depending upon location. As well as this, in the last two decades the cost of photo-voltaic panels (PV) has gone down by more than 10 times, increasing accessibility for dispersed rural applications, and costs are expected to reduce further. Moreover, solar modules can be easily installed anywhere, have no moving parts, and are relatively maintenance-free. We devised a system for running low power consuming computers through a solar powered battery that automatically supplies the load when mains power is disconnected. Detailed information about the device can be found on the product page. Our device, which models a UPS device, takes advantage of the abundant supply of sunlight in rural India to supply low cost power to computers.