I know that weather is supposed to be chaos but this is just silly. The most settled weather we’ve had this year was back in April and since then its been a real mess. It doesn’t look like it wants to change much either. The whole of central Europe is stuck in a mess of […]
I took a long lunch break today for a solar UMPC picnic! The Q1b was really difficult to see in the sunlight (as are all UMPCs) there but after a while, my eyes actually adjusted a bit and it was useable. The only problem is that you have to wind up the backlight which kills […]
This is a solar-powered GPS and track logger. It does the things that I’ll be using my Garmin Etrex for on the tour (still delayed due to the worst summer I can remember for many years!) but in a much tidier way. Transystem Inc, the manufacturer of this product already have a solar powered GPS unit […]
Here’s a solution based on the Sunlinq 25w panel and a Xantrec 300 Plus combo lead-acid battery/inverter. Its very similar to my own solution apart from the fact that this one weighs nearly 10KG!!! A number of blogs seemed to have picked up on this solution today and are quoting 11-12 hours charging time. This figure […]
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 […]
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 […]
The latest weather report is still bad. No chance of leaving in the next 10 days unless the weather report is wildly wrong. Its unbelievable! We had the hottest, driest April ever and since then the clouds and rain just won’t go away and summer storms are threatening almost every day. Looking at the sun graph for the last three days […]
Tonight I’m doing what I’ve been doing most night for the last few months – researching solar power and solar notebook/laptop solutions. Tonight the Google search subject is expeditions. I figured that these guys must have solar computing pretty much sussed by now but I’m struggling to find a solution that can improve on my, […]
It was an early start yesterday. 0445 rise and bus at 0530. 5 hours later after three trains and another bus I arrived at InterSolar 2007 in Freiburg, Germany hoping to find out how I could improve the UMPC Solar kit at Europe’s biggest solar expo. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much there for consumers at all. It was […]
To know that there’s a commercially available solar-powered mobile phone gives me a lot of inspiration and encouragement that one day in the near future we’ll be able to design UMPCs with infinite standby capability. You could have a panel and electronics that senses light levels and keeps the device in standby (or even turned on) […]