The Changers solar panel, power pack/data logger and community is an interesting concept and, I think, a well designed product. Lithium battery charging and solar power don’t fit together easily but when they do you have the potential to get a powerful and lightweight solution. The equipment arrived today, it’s in working order and over […]
The consumer-focused solar charging sector has been damaged in recent years by the influx of cheap China-manufacture red solar chargers that really don’t do what they say. This solution from Changers.com is in a different league. I had the pleasure of speaking to the founders today and got a bit of tech talk in. What […]
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 […]
Samsung make, in my experience, some of the most efficient netbooks and laptops in the market. Over the last 5 years I’ve repeatedly seen idle / background drain figures that are better than anything else which is why I’m looking forward to testing the Samsung TX100 when it launches. Based on Intel’s Oaktrail it should […]
How close are we to powering our tablets with on-device solar cells? In a recent test I ran a tablet connected to the internet at an average 200 mW. That’s screen off, wifi connected and polling in the background to update emails, location, twitter and other processes. It’s nothing really surprising because most of the […]
Looking back on the date of my previous post about a Solar, mobile PC for 2011 I think its time for an update. Firstly, WOW!, the Galaxy Tab is working out amazingly well for me as a productive device and PCs just can touch it in terms of social apps, location, tracking and microblogging. I’m […]
While I’m in the mood, freshly inspired by the e.quinox project, I want to write about a few more super-efficient ‘PCs’ that I’ve been using recently. Both are based on ARM CPUs and show they way for 2011. Later in this article I’ll talk a bit more about technologies to watch out for.
Its been a few months since I’ve posted anything to the solar pc blog but having just watched a BBC World program about e.Quinox and their energy kiosks I felt it was time. The program is available on YouTube and worth a watch. What struck me was that the two most talked about advantages of […]
One of the 45,000 solar panels that are currently being distributed Originally uploaded by Christoph Derndorfer Awesome. Christoph Derndorfer (@random_musings on Twitter, http://christoph-d.blogspot.com/) is out in Lima with the OLPC project and he’s just posted this image on Flickr. 45,000 of these panels are currently being distributed. I’m hoping Christoph has the time to post […]
I talked yesterday about my testing with the Viliv S10 and my 24w solar panel. Today I’ve implemented the solution as my desktop PC. Previously (for the last 5 months) I had been using a Fujitsu U820 UMPC as my desktop. It was running Windows XP on a Intel Atom 1.6 CPU. The Viliv […]