SOLAR LAMP

Simple Solar Circuits: How to get started adding solar power to your small electronics projects. Use the sun to power small solar and battery powered night lights, garden lights, and decorations for halloween.

The first part of a solar circuit is... a device for collecting sunlight. To keep things simple, we're using a single nicely made small solar panel for all of these circuits. The panel that we're using for these circuits is this one, part number PWR1241 from BG Micro, about $3 each. This is a monolithic copper indium diselenide solar panel, apparently printed on a 60mm square of glass and epoxy coated for toughness. On the back of the panel are two (thin) solderable terminals, with marked polarity. (While you can solder directly to the terminals, be sure to stress-relieve the connections, e.g., with a blob of epoxy over your wires.) In full sunlight the panel is specified to produce 4.5 V at up to 90 mA, although 50 mA seems like a more typical figure. [Before we move onto our first examples, a word of caution: These are small simple circuits. In building these, we will quite intentionally gloss over a number of minor details and issues that are unimportant at these low powers, but could become critical if you were to try to scale up.]  Direct Drive: The most obvious way to use power from a solar panel is to connect your load directly to the output leads of the solar panel. Here are a couple of examples of this in practice:
On the left, we've hooked up one of our little solar panels directly to a small motor taken from an old CD player. When you set it out in the sunlight or bring it close to a lamp, the motor starts to spin. On the right we've hooked one of the panels right up to a high-power blue LED. The reason that we've used a high-power LED here is that it can easily withstand 50-90 mA from the solar panel-- a "regular" LED designed for 20 mA would be destroyed by that current. (The LED is the same type that we used for our high-power LED blinking circuit.)  Interruption-resistant direct drive: The "direct drive" circuits work well for their design function, but are rather basic. They provide no energy storage, and so are quite vulnerable to blinking out when a bird or cloud passes overhead. For some applications, like running a small fan or pump, that may be perfectly acceptable. For other cases, like powering a microcontroller or other computer, a brief power interruption can be disruptive. Our next circuit design adds a supercapacitor as a "flywheel" to provide continued power during brief interruptions. Instead of adding a single supercapacitor, you might notice that we've actually added two. That's because the supercaps that we had on hand are rated for 2.75 V-- not enough to handle the 4.5 V output of the panel when sunlight is present. To get around this limitation, we used two of the caps in series, for which the voltage ratings add, giving us a barely-okay total rating of 5.5 V. (Note: be careful adding capacitors of different values in series-- the voltage ratings may scale in non-obvious ways.) When first exposed to the light, this circuit takes about 30 s to 1 minute to charge the capacitors enough that the LED can turn on. After it's fully charged, the circuit can be removed from the sunlight and still drive the blue LED for about 30 s to 1 minute-- a very effective flywheel for light duty applications.  Adding a battery While interruption resistance is nice, a capacitor generally does not provide sufficient energy storage to power a solar circuit for extended periods of time in the dark. A rechargeable battery can of course provide that function, and also provides a fairly consistent output voltage that a capacitor cannot. In this next circuit, we use the solar panel to charge up a NiMH rechargeable battery and also LED off of the power, which will stay on when it gets dark out. SOURCE: EVILSCIENTIST