Solar Engine


We spotted [Kerrin Mansfield]’s lovely solar engine on ladyada’s rantings. It uses 16 1/8th inch solar cells to collect power. At night, an orange LED pulses at .2Hz. He doesn’t have a specific write up on the construction, but from the component layout, it looks identical to [Gareth Branwyn]’s schematic in Make 08, which you can find in the PDF.

7 thoughts on “Solar Engine

  1. That is indeed the schematic I used, though I should say I found it amongst the documentation on solarbotics.com. Just replace the batteries with a BIGFARADS cap, experiment with resistor values to get the desired pulse frequency and woohoo!

    Thank you for blogging this. 8^)

  2. After more detailed reading the PDF this blog entry refers to, I’d like to add that if you choose a smaller electrolytic to store power — I used a 2.5V 3.3F Gold capacitor for aesthetic reasons — then you should use the 74HC240N octal inverting buffer IC, instead of the 74AC240, due to the former’s lower operating voltage and increased stability at lower voltages.

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