60 Watt Solar Panel Built From Cells

September 14, 2008 by Jason Rollette 19 Comments

Our love for solar projects continues on with this method to make your own solar panels. [Mike] built a 60 watt solar panel from individual solar cells he purchased off eBay. Procuring parts off of eBay normally causes others hardship when they try to duplicate the project, however in this case there are so many types of cells people can use to produce their own unique solar panel. Even cells that are extremely damaged my still be used, as in this example. To charge a 12 volt battery the number of cells in series just needs to be 16-18 volts, and the rest in parallel will supply more current. Charging a battery without a charge controller is not recommended, but commercial ones are easily had. Those not interested in jumping all the way in with solar may want to test the waters by building their own panel and putting it to use as a charging station for your portable gadgets.

USB Wall Charger

August 8, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 20 Comments

[rbhays] did this sweet little hack back in 2006. He took a Motorola cellphone wall charger and modified it into a USB wall charger. He needed to charge his iPod, but misplaced the original charger. A replacement would have cost him $30. So he did what any respectable hacker would do, he cut up something else to make it work for him.

He had one sitting around that was equipped with a mini USB end. He checked it out and it was the perfect voltage. Some commenters below the project noted that their motorola charger had a higher voltage rating than his. Those would still work, but would require some extra steps to bring the voltage down.

After some careful soldering, and a bit of super glue, he’s left with a perfectly good wall charger. He can charge most things that only use the juice from the wall. Some things refuse to charge though, such as Zunes. There was another project by [Cvesey] that claims to charge Zunes as well. While wall chargers may be available fairly cheaply now, many of us have some of these cellphone chargers just sitting around. Now we have a use for them.

New Sparkfun Designs

July 10, 2008 by Juan Aguilar 6 Comments

Sparkfun has recently released a bevy of new boards and other devices, with some very intriguing new builds among them.

The first board that caught our attention is the Wee. It is a compact Arduino compatible controller that features a small size, low voltage, and many other minimalist attributes. It is built around an ATMega 168V and uses all SMD parts.

For even tinier fun, check out the LilyPad LED. It is a LED designed to be incorporated into clothing, featuring large holes for threading, a thin and extremely small PCB and a very bright 250mcd light. It is also washable, meaning that one or many can permanently be incorporated into clothing without fear of losing them. You can see these in the turn signal jacket we covered earlier.

The last one we’ll discuss is the LiPoly Charger, a USB lithium ion battery charger. Based on the Max 1555 IC, the LiPoly can use USB bus power or a 2.1mm center positive wallwart power(it uses the more high-powered wall-wart if both are connected). It can’t charge NiMH batteries, but it is still compact, efficient, and very useful.