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This solar panel tracks the sun using solar cells. It’s a pretty interesting technique, and can be done on the cheap. The rectangular panels are doing the actual energy harvesting. The circular modules seen below are solar cells from some landscaping lights. They’re being used as sensors to help judge if the device is aimed [...]

Tags:  sun dawg panel solar-cells rectangular-panels solar-panel green hacks  

[Bryan] got his hands on a solar panel and decided to take it on the road rather than throwing it on the roof of the house. On sunny days it will top off the car battery, letting him use his stereo in the middle of nowhere without needing to keep the engine running. Instead of [...]

Tags:  truck prototyping charger bryan solar-charger solar-panel car-battery green hacks  

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  

Instructables user [martzsam] recently built a simple robot using miscellaneous junk he found around his house. The first parts he scrounged up were a pair of 1.5v electric motors and some wire scraps, after which, he went to work on an old garden light. He detailed how to carefully remove the light’s solar panel as [...]

Tags:  user instructables junkbot solar-panel scraps robots hacks  

For all those times you need to broadcast your own access point where there’s no outlet [Larry] shows us how to make a solar-powered hotspot. He started by slapping a solar panel on the lid of a cigar box and attaching it to five rechargeable AA batteries inside. These power the mainboard from a router which is [...]

Tags:  solar repeater wifi larry wifi-repeater cigar-box solar-panel Wireless hacks  

[Phillip Torrone], one of the original crew of HackaDay, now working with [LadyAda] tipped us off to this video of her explaining the device they built for configuring the charging circuits to be used with their solar panels. Unlike most of their tutorials, this one is not intended to be a final product sold on [...]

Tags:  solar ladyada panel hackaday solar-panel solar-panels arduino hacks  

We first wrote about the MintyBoost back in 2006. Today, Adafruit has created a tutorial for making a solar powered MintyBoost. Using a MintyBoost, a solar panel, LiPo battery and a charger, they built on their Solar LiPoly tutorial. They fed the power tap output of the LiPoly charger into the battery input of the [...]

Tags:  solar mintyboost tutorial lipoly solar-panel adafruit cellphones hacks  

As we all know, a solar panel must be exposed to the most amount of sunlight possible to reach full efficiency. A solid mount limits the amount of time that the panel is fully exposed to direct sunlight. The solution is to build a pivoting mount that automates the process of aiming at the sun. [...]

Tags:  sun amount panel solar-panel amount-of-time sunlight home hacks