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When you get down to it, solar cells aren’t much different from the diodes and transistors in your parts drawers or inside your beloved electronics. They’re both made of silicon or some other semiconductor, and surprisingly can produce electricity in the presence of light. Here’s two semiconductors-as-solar panel projects that rolled into the tip line [...]

Tags:  silicon aren semiconductor panel-projects solar-cells solar-panel solar hacks  

[Mathieu] just finished analyzing the numbers from a month of solar energy harvesting. You may remember that he was curious to see what kind of energy can be collected from small solar cells used indoors. He built several copies of a test platform which collected data between December 16th and January 16th. First of all, [...]

Tags:  energy month harvesting mathieu solar-cells test-platform solar-energy green hacks  

[Mathieu] was interested in using more solar cells for his everday electronics. He looked around but couldn’t find much information about using pholovoltaic for small indoor devices. We remember hearing some of the same things from [Dave Jones] in one of his EEVblog installments from a few years ago which looked at solar calculators; the [...]

Tags:  everday couldn crunching dave-jones mathieu solar-calculators solar-cells installments green hacks  

We’ve all heard of solar cells that charge your devices, or the odd flashlight that charges when you shake it, but this style charger should be new to almost everyone. This “pan charger” is reportedly capable of charging a cell phone or other mobile device using a USB connection in 3 to 5 hours.  It [...]

Tags:  alternative charger phone other-mobile-device solar-cells usb-connection cellphones hacks  

Instructables user [flapke] has a Kobo eReader and wanted to add some solar cells to it in order to charge the battery for free. The modification is similar to others we have seen recently, though his work was done so well that it almost looks stock. He started out by sourcing a pair of solar panels [...]

Tags:  sun ereader battery solar-cells solar-panels handhelds hacks