4 ms·
Did anybody ever reproduce his findings? I recently tried to make a SnZb cell based on the patent, but it didn't work. :(
by mglz 3y ago
Did anybody ever reproduce his findings? I recently tried to make a SnZb cell based on the patent, but it didn't work. :(
- owyn 3y agoThat's very cool! Can you say more about it or is there a project web site? Trying to replicate inventions from the patent filings must be incredibly difficult. They are primarily legal documents and not technical documents, unfortunately. I feel like you shouldn't be able to get a patent unless you submit full building plans. I don't think software patents are a good idea but if you had to open source the code in exchange for a license, that also seems like an acceptable tradeoff.
- mglz 3y agoI mostly based my experiment on this website [1]. There's no documentation about it yet, bust basically I alloyed zinc and antimony in a crucible at 700°C and splat-cooled it (pour onto a steel surface and squish the cooling metal with a copper block). The resulting disk is quite brittle. I mounted it in a improvised clamp, between a copper and german silver electrode. No diode behaviour could be measured. I think my backyard metallurgy is not very precise though. Also, my current way of holding the sample might be all kinds of bad. So some more messing around is needed [1] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/10/how-to-build-a-low-tech-solar-panel https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/10/how-to-build-a-low...