Adrian writing again this week (easing Chris back into things gently, he'll be back to weeknote-writing next week...)

After a break with Covid Chris is back with a negative test, mainly generating sawdust. He's looking at generating paths in Freecad for the DoES Liverpool CNC machine. As yet we've got some unusual shaped pieces of mdf and some mild expletives. This has also lead to him looking at an open issue on the DoES Somebody should list to improve the dust extraction.

I've been picking up work on the solar/wind battery charger circuit that Laura Pullig and I have been developing.

Normally I'm pretty good at the divide and conquer approach to work, which means that I can chip away at things even when work is fragmented with other demands. Making notes as you go is another key part of that — effectively storing state as you context-switch to another task so that you can easily pick things up again when you get back to it.

However, that doesn't always work. Sometimes you need a larger block of time to pull everything together in your head and work out the next set of tasks. That's where I'd gotten to with the charger design and as there hadn't been any larger blocks of time available, things had stalled on it.

This week I made time to dedicate to getting moving on it again. Some of that invovled some decisions on the requirements — which are a little nebulous as it's more of a research project, with fewer hard "right" answers — and some was looking at the bigger picture and then breaking that down into a new set of tasks.

So I've got a bunch of new issues to work through along with some forward progress on designing the circuit and laying out components.

And I'm rid of the nagging, stuck feeling. Which is very nice.