It’s the 23rd of March. We’re into Spring in Europe and the sun has just moved above my neighbor’s house.  According to the local weatherstation there’s 365 W/m2 hitting ground level. I’m getting 1 Watt out of my 4W Changers Maroshi panel.

Weighing just 800 grams and packing 14 W of maximum output the Anker 14W portable foldable solar charger looks like a bargain at $59.99 / €49.99. I stumbled across this at CeBIT 2015 in Hannover and took a look over it. It’s well-built, has a regulated 5V output via USB and a lot of good reviews on Amazon.com. I’m almost suspicious of the 4.5 rating from 700 reviews though because I see some issues, and it’s not because there’s a partial solar eclipse over my head as I write this!

Anker 14 W solar charger

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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 following weeks i’ll be doing some testing.

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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 I found out got me excited about doing another solar computing tour because the intelligent power pack is one of the best i’ve seen. I want to pair it with the Lenovo Lynx PC. Clovertrail is perfect for travel computing and the Lynx even charges via micro USB. In theory, one 4hr charging session will charge about 60% of the Lenovo’s internal battery for about 4hrs of work. 1hr charging for 1hr computing is a real groundbreaking achievement, if it works.

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 reasonable €149

While the build quality didn’t look that great, this would still be a good purchase for emergency use.

The price also indicates that some mass manufacturing is starting for the consumer market now. Certainly the Summer 2011 edition of a local electronics catalogue shows way more solutions and products than just a few years ago.

Have you seen more consumer solar equipment for sale this year?

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 S10 is running Windows 7 Home Starter on the same Atom 1.6 CPU. Both solutions use a fast SSD. You can see that I have it set up to drive an external monitor, mouse and keyboard but I’m still using the screen on the S10 as an extended monitor. With the extended screen, Windows 7, quieter operation and a better USB solution (the USB bus on the U820 would often reset causing a keyboard and mouse lock-up) this is a better working solution than I had before.

Cont’d…

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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 the back. The price: $260.

• 700gm
• 8″, 800×480
• 400Mhz MIPS CPU

It’s eco friendly too “..the system body’s is made from bioplastics and other biodegradable materials derived from starch and cellulose” [source]

Here’s my take. Using a PC in the sun is hard work on the eyes and hard work on the battery as you need to pump up the backlight. The solar panel is also very small (I estimate 4W max output) so with a device that’s likely to be in the 3-4W operating power range, it’s at best, a trickle charger that can keep the device topped up when not in use. Putting panels on PC’s does a nice job of cutting out the losses you get when charging external power banks but they need to be detachable to get the best use out of them.

Still, bravo to iUnika for doing this. There are definitely some customers that would benefit from this. Education in hot countries with poor infrastructure comes immediately to mind.

Source: Gearlog

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 solarumpc tour this year but I am planning to get some use out of the panel. At the moment, the plan is to run a UMPC from the solar panel that could serve this blog. I doubt i’ll be able to do it 24/7 for the whole of summer but I’m running some tests on the Raon Digital Everun S6S at the moment to see exactly how much I could get out of it with the 24W panel.

The Everun, when configured for 400Mhz with WIfi and screen off, will consume a tiny 4W at idle and about 6W at full power which is about as low as you can go with a PC without having to switch to an ARM architecture. I don’t want to do that because the plan is just to install a basic Ubuntu image, fire up Apache and SSH and serve this blog as a set of static web pages. WIthout Mysql or PHP running it should keep the processor load down to a minimum although i’m not sure that Ubuntu will be able to switch the CPU into 400Mhz mode. It might have to stay locked at 600Mhz.

At 5W drain, the server would need 120Wh of energy to power it for a full day. With a 24Wh panel I’m only going to get about 80-100Wh per day on average (using the 4-hours sun/day  rule that applies to this part of the world) so at some point, back-up power is going to be needed. The problem is, how can I switch-over to back-up power (or gracefuly switch over to another server.) Switching the servers is OK but getting the Everun to shutdown when it reaches 5% power is impossible under Linux right now.

The Alternative is to shut-down the server between 0300 and 0900 every day and to try and regulate it that way or just keep topping up the SLA battery from other sources when needed.

I’m going to need a couple of new items for this project though.

1) Power usage measurement tools. I want to feed the data back into the website. Power used, power given by panel, current battery level. Any tips there would be much appreciated. Should I buy a dedicated data logging system with software or are there simpler ways to do this.

2) An ethernet port. The Everun only has a WIfi connection and that would take too much power so I’m looking at a USB to Ethernet adaptor. This one from SMC takes about 150mw which will be fine.

3) Bigger SLA battery. Rather than using the 56whr battery that I have, I should get one that takes about 200wh so that if we have two or three good days of sunshine, I can store the engergy and use it on days where the sun is weaker.

Solar panel positioning is going to be a major problem at my house which is badly oriented for a solar panel. I’m also a bit worried about loss along the length of cable I will need in order to position the solar panel correctly.

Over the next few weeks I hope to at least have a partial solar-powered web server running but if this blog disappears, you’ll know what’s happened!