Producing a maximum 300mw in a 27cm square, 0.8mm thick, this lightweight panel just announced by Sharp looks interesting and gives an indication of where we are in small consumer-focused solar panels. This newly developed solar module makes effective use of compact semiconductor packaging technology to achieve a thickness of just 0.8 mm, the thinnest […]
MacRumors have just reported on a patent filed by Apple that shows how they see a possibility to integrate solar cells into the display panel. Solar panels will have to get much more efficient and power-drain reduced down to the sub 5W range before this technique has legs for any form of general computing device. […]
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 […]
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 […]