Reviewing the numbers from one month of solar harvesting

[Mathieu] just finished analyzing the numbers from a month of solar energy harvesting. You may remember that he was curious to see what kind of energy can be collected from small solar cells used indoors. He built several copies of a test platform which collected data between December 16th and January 16th.

First of all, it’s not shocking to … Read the rest

Solar charger for Occupy Boston

As soon as the team at Revolt Labs heard Occupy Wall Street was coming to Boston, they decided to pick up their soldering irons in support of the throngs of protestors. They came up with a Solar charging USB box to keep those cell phones and digital cameras charged.

The case came direct from an Army surplus store. Originally, the … Read the rest

eReader battery never goes flat (in the sun)

solar_powered_kobo

Instructables user [flapke] has a Kobo eReader and wanted to add some solar cells to it in order to charge the battery for free. The modification is similar to others we have seen recently, though his work was done so well that it almost looks stock.

He started out by sourcing a pair of solar panels from DealExtreme that … Read the rest

Fixing the Rovio battery charging circuit

[Chris] was unhappy with the battery performance of his Rovio. It seems that he’s not alone, so he set out to reverse engineer the battery charging circuit to see if there was a fix. Boy is there, what he found is the diode above, apparently installed backwards when compared to the silk screen diode symbol. Now it’s entirely possible that … Read the rest

Intelligent battery charging

[Razor] shares with us the plans for an intelligent battery charging circuit. Instead of blindly charging your battery into oblivion, this one shuts off once  the battery is fully charged. It is a nice clean circuit that can be adjusted and fine tuned to your specific needs via some trim pots and dip switches.

[via HackedGadgets]… Read the rest

Nintendo DS mini USB plug

DSCompare

Noting that so many of his electronics are using the mini USB plug for charging, [Xavier] decided to modify his Nintendo DS to charge via the same adapter. It looks like the existing adapter is basically a proprietary mini USB plug, so replacing it was actually almost a perfectly clean swap job. He has nice pictures of the process and … Read the rest

Willow Garage’s PR2 robot

We would like you to meet PR2. Made by Willow Garage, PR2 is a platform for research into robotic programming.  The bot itself is simple compared to some of the humanoid bots we see, but its behavior is quite complex. In the video above, you see PR2 completing milestone 2 of its development. This includes navigating an office with … Read the rest