Sunday, March 22, 2015

Solar Charging my USB Backup Battery

I'm pretty outdoorsy, and I love to go camping. However I also love my electronics. Usually if I go camping I'll turn my cell phone off to preserve the battery, and actually put on my wrist watch for once to tell time for a few days. I usually end up turning it back on at some point or another, and it's always a guessing game wondering how long until the battery runs out. Some phones use up more energy when in a low signal area, draining their batteries even faster. About a year ago I bought a 10,400 mAh USB backup battery made by Bluetimes. It has two USB outputs, one of them with 2A output. I originally bought it to power my Odroid U3/Lapdock combo that I also have a post about. After I got rid of my Odroid I found it pretty handy to keep in my backpack for when I need to charge my phone or other devices, but don't have access to an outlet, or just when I forgot my charger. 10,400 mAh is pretty decent, but will only get you so far. That's where this comes in:
I've had this thing laying around for over a year now, I'm not even sure where I got it. They make much nicer ones these days with a battery pack build right in, but I can't afford that stuff! The problem was this cheap thing didn't come with a microUSB adapter... I've had it for a while but I don't know if they've updated the product or not. The good thing is it comes with alligator clips. So I just took an old cell phone charger, cut off the end, and stripped the end so I could hook up the alligator clips. Voila! A simple fix. I set it to 3v, 200mA, put the solar panel in the sunlight and the lights lit up on the battery, indicating it was charging! Although it's not charging as fast as it would off an outlet, it's better than nothing! Now I can recharge my backup battery on the go, and have a continuous, although small source of power when I'm camping. I'll probably solder over the wires soon so that I have something durable to clip onto, but otherwise I don't think it needs much more modification.

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