DIY | Voltaic Systems – Solar DIY and Device Charging

After two trips to Home Depot and a few more hours than expected, we completed our booth for the Bay Area Maker Faire. In the spirit of DIY, we assembled a wall from Voltaic shipping boxes. In addition to having …

DIY Dynamo Video

We shot a quick video of the DIY Dynamo charging our external battery that we covered in a previous post. It is connected up to a dual multimeter test box that Phillip worked up. Note that the dynamo is sending …

Make a Dynamo to Charge Your Phone

Voltaic System’s battery packs will take charge from solar panels, AC adapters, USB ports, even other battery packs. You can also charge them from kinetic power sources like hand-cranked or bike driven dynamos. Here’s how we did it.

Solar Charging Capacitors for LED Lighting

John in Arkansas is doing some experimentation using capacitors to store power for LED lighting. He’s connecting one of our small solar panels (6Volt, 2 Watt) to a variety of capacitors and using those capacitors to run LEDs. He reports …

Michigan Student Solar Charger Design

A group of engineering students at University of Michigan designed their own solar charger using our 2 Watt solar panels. They have a couple ideas in here that we like. The first is to mount the panels and phones inside …

Solar Charger in Haiti

When we found a stash of 10Volt panels in our warehouse move, we made them available at a pretty good price (2 for $18) hoping folks would find a good use for them. Well, Josh Brown from Action Santa Cruz …

Free Solar Panel Friday

We’ve been cleaning out our warehouse the past few days and we found a small stash of 10Volt, 1.3 Watt solar panels that are a bit dinged or marked up but otherwise seem to be in good working order. I’ll …

Adafruit Tutorial on LEDs

We believe LEDs are going to be one of the most transformative technologies of the next twenty years. In the developed world, they will eventually replace fluorescent and incandescant lights. In the developing world, they will replace fossil-fuel based lighting …

Solar Harley Project

Many motorcycles do not have a cigarette lighter adapter which leaves a lot of riders without power for their phone or other electronic devices. Lief Ellis mounted our 2 Watt solar panel on the back seat of his Harley to …

Why we use Monocrystalline Cells

We are often asked why we use monocrystalline cells instead of some of the newer technologies including amorphous silicon, CIGS and dye-based photovoltaics. The primary answer is that we’re interested in power density. We want to produce the most Watts …