Find the schematic below. Added a switch to keep the LED off all the time... which effectively makes the whole thing a solar powered battery charger...
Notes to self:
- The solar panel is directly connected to the battery for charging. Without any control on voltage or current. May damage the battery in a long run. But then, the solar panel used is not that powerful... so....
- A normal LED requires more than 1 AA cell to power it up. To overcome this, the center-tapped-coil and one of the transistor formed a switching circuit. It generates voltage high enough to light up the LED with less than one volt.
- Unlike the commercially available Sun Jar, this circuit doesn't use photoresistor to control when to light up the LED. Instead, a transistor is used to detect the voltage output of the solar panel.
2 comments:
Your video has been marked as private so it cannot be viewed. I am trying various circuit combinations that will yield the most efficient output to make a sun jar also. Thanks for posting your circuit!
Hi Jay. Didn't realize that I changed the video to private. Just changed it back to public. Happy hacking!
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