Our bench top power supply project has been submitted to citizen scientist as a piece of lab equipment. We started knowing roughly what we want to create but the first steps of the project has been about clearly specifying the final outputs.

The user requirements are complex as a user will not only interact with the final design but also construct, maintain and upgrade. We have assumed a basic skill level restricting the technology available. Access to a reasonable set of tools is also assumed and fabrication houses recommended must be low budget and low volume friendly.

The technical requirements are an exercise in defining goals within the limit of our reach given timescales and resources. Reinventing the wheel would likely score many points but is useless when the hackaday prize deadlines pass us by yet hacking together another unrepeatable mess of hot glue and stripboard will be just as useless.

In parallel we have been landscaping existing commercial/open source designs and researching nice tricks we can play to reduce final BoM cost and improve performance. Next up will be sketching designs and the beginnings of formal CAD.