Upgrading a solar lamp to charge an iPad

October 28, 2011 By 16 Comments

ikea_sunnan_upgrade

[Phillip] and the crew at Voltaic Systems took a look at the Sunnan solar powered desk lamp from IKEA a while back, and while they thought it was pretty useful, there were definitely some things they wanted to change.

First on their list of revisions was to increase the capacity of the stock battery pack. Taking the lamp apart and … Read the rest

Filed Under: solar hacks Tagged With: , , , ,

Quick & Dirty USB phone charger

April 14, 2011 By 33 Comments

usb_phone_charger

Hackaday forum member [Dan Fruzzetti] wrote in to share a simple, yet useful hack he built just the other day. He and his wife both have Evo 4G smartphones and they were pretty disappointed in the lack of portable charging solutions available.

Instead of buying something and modifying it to his needs, [Dan] decided to build a quick and … Read the rest

Filed Under: Cellphone Hacks, misc hacks Tagged With: , , , ,

Solar MintyBoost

July 10, 2010 By 9 Comments

We first wrote about the MintyBoost back in 2006. Today, Adafruit has created a tutorial for making a solar powered MintyBoost. Using a MintyBoost, a solar panel, LiPo battery and a charger, they built on their Solar LiPoly tutorial. They fed the power tap output of the LiPoly charger into the battery input of the … Read the rest

Filed Under: Cellphone Hacks, handhelds hacks, iphone hacks, ipod hacks Tagged With: , ,