NEW PRODUCT – USB / DC / Solar Lithium Ion/Polymer charger – v1.0. Make your projects to go green this summer with our specialized USB/Solar Lithium Ion Polymer Battery charger! This charger is a very unique design, perfect for outdoor projects, or DIY iPod chargers. We’ve spent over a year testing and tinkering with this charger to come up with a plug and play solution to charging batteries with the sun and we’re really pleased with what we ended up with.
Easy to use! Pick up any of our many 3.7V/4.2V LiIon batteries, and a 6V solar panel. Plug the battery into the BATT port using a 2-pin JST cable and the solar panel into the DC jack using a 2.1mm terminal block adapter. Put the solar panel outside (and keep the battery out of the sun, it needs to be kept shaded!) to start charging. You can power another project like a Mintyboost at the same time by connecting to the LOAD output port
Battery and MintyBoost not included.
Our carefully designed charger is designed specifically for solar charging, and will automatically draw the most current possible from the panel in any light condition!
This isn’t a true MPPT (max power point tracker), but has similar performance. Our detailed tutorial on how to use this charger includes a design document explaining how it all works. Please read all of the documentation before purchasing.
Comes with an assembled and tested charger board, a large capacitor (you will need to solder it in however you would like it to sit), a JST 2-pin cable for connecting up a battery or load, and for a limited time a bonus 2.1mm adapter cable that will convert the small 1.4mm jack to a 2.1mm jack.
- 3.7V/4.2V Lithium Ion or Lithium Polymer battery charger
- Charge with 5-6V DC, USB or solar panel!
- Too dark out? Use a USB mini-B cable or a 5V DC adapter
- Automatic charging current tracking for high efficiency use of any wattage solar panel
- Use any 5-6V solar panel (6V seems to work best)
- Three color indicator LEDs – Power good, Charging and Done
- Low Battery Indicator (fixed at 3.1V) with LED output
- Set for 500mA max charge rate, can be adjusted from 50mA up to 1A by soldering in a resistor
- Will always draw the most current possible from a solar cell – up to the max charge rate!
- Smart load sharing automatically uses the input power when available, to keep battery from constantly charging/discharging
- Temperature monitoring of battery by soldering in a 10K NTC thermistor (not included) – suggested for outdoor projects where the battery may get hot (50°C) or cold (0°C).
Again, this isn’t a true MPPT (max power point tracker), but has similar performance. Our detailed tutorial on how to use this charger includes a design document explaining how it all works and why we designed this product.
I just made something EXACTLY like this (well, without the automatic current tracking, that’s really nifty, dammit now I want one) with a solar panel I built myself, and your lipo charger.
That is a huge capacitor. 4700 uF. Wow. It seems that the maxim of “when in doubt, put on more decoupling capacitors” holds true here.
hj, the capacitor may be a bit overspecced but if you look at any kind of solar charging system of reasonable complexity there’s a massive cap to stabilize the panel. as we do more testing, future revisions may have a smaller cap.
I wasn’t questioning the design, I’m sure you specced it for a reason, and I would hope I’m the last person to question one of your designs. I’ve just been helping high school students debug mobile robots for 2 weeks, and it seems that when all hope of making their control boards work is lost, adding another decoupling capacitor (up to 1000uF or so) seems to fix the problem. Gotta love the noise injected by two 3-amp stepping motors.
Very nice. I made something similar for my iPhone just over a year ago using Minty Boost. Still working today. http://electricprojects.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/solar-iphone-charger/