Tag Archive
Consumer Solar Kit Gets Cheaper
Spotted in my local hardware supermarket today was a surprisingly cheap 12v solar kit. The 15w solid panel was packaged with a regulator / converter that had various output voltages, two led lighting solutions and a 7ah 12v battery. The 220v inverter shown in the image was not included in the kit. The price? A [...]
The Cheap, All-In-One Solar PC. iUnika Solar Announced.
Does this mean goodbye to my solar panel, my 1KG lead-acid battery and the box full of cables I have? Does these mean that you won’t have to spend over $1000 on a Solar UMPC kit now? iUnika have announced a range of very low end, low-cost netbooks which include one with a solar-panel on [...]
Solar-UMPC-powered web server testing.
Yes, its that time of year again where we get the first encouraging days of sunshine in Europe so I’ve been into the cellar and dusted-off my Sunlinq 24W solar panel. Sun strength for the last 2.5 days. I’m not planning a solar-umpc tour this year but I am planning to get some use [...]
14W Solar bag. Useful but expensive.
It looks like Voltaic will be releasing a 14w solar panel bag, a huge step up from their, largely useless, at least for UMPCs, 4W bad. I hope its not a typo as the three-panel setup look exactly the same as before. If it really is 14W then I’m interested. Well almost. The design is [...]
Solar UMPCs on the Appalachian trail.
It’s nice to see that someone else is as tech mad as me! Scott, currently residing in Cubicle 13, has decided to get out of the rat race for 18 months and he’s taking a UMPC and Solar panel with him. 18 Months! 6 months of that will be on the Appalachian trail! Scott is [...]
How to improve solar charging PC efficiency for consumer devices.
Last Thursday I spent a lot of time analyzing exactly how efficient my charging solution was with a real-life test. What dropped out was a rather poor picture of how inefficient the whole solar charging setup was. From over 1.2KW hitting the area of my solar panel I managed to use about 19W. That’s a [...]
Mathematics, sunburn and how 1.2kw of energy gives you 2 hours of computing.
When I did my first tests and calculations about the use of solar power to drive a PC I was quite amazed at the inefficiency of the process and today’s ‘laboratory conditions’ test proves just how much room for improvement there is. It’s thanks to devices like UMPCs that this is project is at all possible [...]
Sunlinq 25W and Tekkeon Power bank work well together.
I don’t really understand why I didn’t try this before. Its simple. its recommended and it works. Have I been too focused on flexibility why simplicity could be the answer? I was speaking to Chris from Euro-Line, an importer of consumer solar products and he highlighted a document that I’d already seen. I took another [...]
Solar charging. Lead Acid vs Li-Ion
In a recent comment here, someone asked why the Lead-Acid battery was needed. Its probably not too clear in the video why I use it so I reproduce my answer (which comes from the best of my knowledge!) here. There are two main problems with charging Li-Ion batteries from Solar panels. Firstly, Li-Ion batteries (in [...]
Blue Bike Baggage test
Encouraged by yesterdays progress with the solar kit, I spent most of today finishing off the wiring and packing it all into a plastic box. I then paired down my kit list somewhat (out goes the Nokia N800 and spare mobile phone, two pairs of underwear, one of the t-shirts, the multimeter and a pair [...]