The consumer-focused solar charging sector has been damaged in recent years by the influx of cheap China-manufacture red solar chargers that really don’t do what they say. This solution from Changers.com is in a different league. I had the pleasure of speaking to the founders today and got a bit of tech talk in. What I found out got me excited about doing another solar computing tour because the intelligent power pack is one of the best i’ve seen. I want to pair it with the Lenovo Lynx PC. Clovertrail is perfect for travel computing and the Lynx even charges via micro USB. In theory, one 4hr charging session will charge about 60% of the Lenovo’s internal battery for about 4hrs of work. 1hr charging for 1hr computing is a real groundbreaking achievement, if it works.
Lesson number one in the Solar-UMPC project is that the weather is chaos and if you live in mid-northern Europe, you can’t rely on it as a source of instant energy. You’ll see how I’ve had to adapt my solution in my first Solar UMPC video. In the video I present the solar charging and storage setup that I’ve decided to use for the tour. Its based on the fag-packet drawing I did a few weeks ago after deciding that Li-Ion batteries weren’t really the best solution.
I’ve introduced the lead-acid battery as a buffer and despite the 100-year old technology and 2.6KG weight, provides the perfect stabiliser to the whole architecture.
A quick rundown of the equipment I’m using (mostly bought from my home country, Germany.)
