When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. What if life gives you a pile of old e-book readers? Well, when [spiritplumber] got box of old Nook Simple Touch devices, he decided to design solar-powered cases to help boost the old batteries. It makes perfect sense to us: sunlight readable screen, sunlight chargeable battery.
It looks like he’s got a pair of panels built into the 3D printed case. He recommends using any TP4056-based charger, and tying into the battery test points, not the 5 V supply. It won’t hurt anything if you do, apparently, but the device will think it’s plugged in an refuse to turn off the WiFi. That’s no big deal when you’ve got a continental power grid on the other end of the cable, but charging from a small panel on the back of the case doesn’t always give you enough juice to waste on unneeded radio activity. Especially indoors — these panels are apparently big enough to trickle-charge the device under artificial light, which is a nice, if doubtless slow feature.
The design is open source, and includes SketchUp design files as well as the exported .STL, so if you’ve got a hankering to edit this to fit a different e-book reader, you can. He also provides a handy-dandy guide to root this model of Nook, and if you’re on Hackaday we probably don’t need to explain why you might want to.
We’ve seen the Nook Simple Touch go some interesting places — like into the clouds as a glider computer — but solar power is a new hack for this device, at least on this site. We don’t know if [spiritplumber] has a green thumb, but he’s evidently got some environmental bones in his body: his last featured project was about improving quadcopter efficiency with a wing and a prayer.
Very nice. I’ve got a Kobo that has only ever been charged from solar power, though not integrated like this. I just plug it into a 6W panel or charge from a power bank that was charged from solar.
I’ve got a few of those 5v/300ma panels in my parts bin and may look into integrating them into the folio case. Using the USB input shouldn’t be a problem since the Kobo firmware doesn’t force the wifi on when it’s plugged in.
Simple Touch are a prepper goldmine. Store many GB of PDFs, month-long battery, charge with small power, cheap, plentiful, durable, easy to protect.
I have two that I keep in the car in an EMP bag, and each has two micro SD cards. I carry my library with me everywhere I go.
Adding solar is the cherry on top. Wish I had inherited a pile of Nooks.
My NST got very sticky after some time, how do you solve that?
Oh, answering myself, that’s why they put it into the case https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6911340 I hopoed for removing it somehow. I just wrapped mine into a transparent foil.
Both isopropyl alcohol and brake cleaner work good on removing sweating of plastics, apply talcum if needed. As dirty quick fix, carefully sprinkle with wheat flour and rub off the stickiness.
If you want to remove sticky velour paint completely, do so with acetone.
NST is awesome. Still using mine. It runs Android 2 and has two different methods/hacks to eliminate flicker on refreshing. One seems to use some dithering technique, so even playing Angry Birds is possible.