Solar power your arduino with a playing card (and some bits of raw PV). Works in sunlight or indoors, like a customized peel-and-stick power source for your projects.

This guide details a way to make this solar panel from scratch, for maximum flexibility and joy. It’s part of the Solar Pocket series of instructables.

Tested with the new Leonardo Arduino and SparkFun’s Arduino Pro, but it’ll work with basically any board out there with a bit of adjustment on the number of solettes added to the playing card.

, https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wLAYnPhkkKU/hqdefault.jpg

source

16 Comments

  1. love your project! Please don't stop posting videos!
    regards

  2. hi, nice simple idea. but rather take a piece of thicker cardboard and dont overlap the solettes. by overlapping, you shade small areas. the less light intensity a solar cells gets, the higher the resistance of the module. the higher the inner resistance, the less current flows. ansd since power = voltage * current … you do end up with less power, than would have been possible. it might be enough for the arduino in this case, but i think its important to at least know that a shading of 2% can cause up to 70% less power.

  3. great fuckin song. Finally the Chili Peppers make something good again.  Great project

  4. That's bit confusing, agreed. The copper tape doesn't need to run the entire length of the underside of the card. That said, even with the long length of tape I used in the video, the bottom of a solette doesn't actually touch both pieces of tape at once — I just cut the first piece of tape a bit too long. Thanks for the comment!

  5. Why does the copper tape run the entire length on the underside of the card? When it wraps around to the other side, isn't that connecting the bottom of the first solette to the bottom of the final one?

  6. @Fredrik: the first solette that gets placed will have its underside in contact with one of the pieces of copper tape. The underside of the solettes is (+), so the copper tape that touches the underside of the first solette is positive.

  7. Awesome!

    But one question, probably obvious too:
    How do I know which side is positive and which is negative?

  8. Well-timed question! We just launched a Kickstarter campaign to get solettes out into the world. Go to Kickstarter and search for Solar Pocket Factory, or check out the new link at the end of this video. Thanks!

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