Author Jeff

How to Estimate Solar Charge Time Unfortunately, solar charge time is not as simple as just dividing your battery capacity (measured in Watt hours) by the power of your solar panel (measured in Watts). Even...

How to Charge a Microsoft Surface from an External Battery Pack Microsoft Surface and Surface Pros use proprietary charging connectors, which make it difficult if you are trying to charge your Surface on the...

Dwayne Burgess recently crossed the country by bicycle on the Trans America route. He used our 17 Watt Solar Charger Kit to keep his MacBook, Canon 5D and phone powered up on the trip. There were a lot of...

The International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP) works with the world's top photographers to document environmentally valuable and, often, endangered regions. Andy Maser and Peter Mather recently...

Christopher Dutton has created a series of solar-powered and networked water level loggers to monitor the Mara river levels in Tanzania. They have three stations deployed and uploading data to the Internet now...

Photographer Luke Walker recently took a 16 day trip down the Grand Canyon. He sent us this trip post-mortem: Rafting the Grand Canyon of the Colorado river presents challenges that are unique to its...

We are happy to provide solar panels for the students who go through Blue Stamp Engineering's summer program. Students get to choose what to make and then post the results. Perhaps not surprisingly, solar...

We hacked a smartphone dry bag to make it a solar dry bag. In this example, we use a 6 Watt Kit, 4 foot extension cable and dry bag (try searching for  "dry audio case") to make a waterproof solar...

Photographer Karim Iliya was in Iceland for a month on assignment and brought our Array Solar Laptop Charger along to keep his equipment, most importantly the Canon 5D Mark 3, charged. The "backpack basically...

Ian Downard recently built a solar powered chicken coop door to make it easier to give his chickens time to be in the yard. The system is powered by our 3.4 Watt solar panel and V15 battery in Always...

New Hampshire photographer Joe Klementovich recently borrowed our GoPro time lapse setup for a stint on Tuckerman's ravine. Here is a week of footage in temps ranging from -17 to 27 degrees. Look closely and...

The Marantz PMD661 is one of the sound recorders of choice for professional ornithologists. However, the battery life using AAs is limited to about four hours, which isn't enough for some applications. The...

We're heading out to Mt. Washington for a backcountry ski trip and bringing along lots of USB devices to make our trip more fun. To understand the power needs for our solar chargers, we created a summary of...

We recently got a nice email from Matthew Perpick about their Nine Rivers Documentary. They took canoes on a thousand kilometer trip: "The journey begins in Pickle Lake, where Ontario's paved roads end, and...

We've got ways to mount solar panels, zip ties, suction cups and with handlebar mounts and now we're exploring magnets. We see this as being useful for attaching panels to a tin-corrugated roof or on top of...

Earlier this year, our customers helped send solar lighting kits (Roof-mountable 3.4 Watt Solar Panel, V15 USB Battery, USB Touchlight) to the village of Zatuba in Malawi. The lights were purchased by members...

National Geographic Explorer and filmmaker Ricky Qi and team have been documenting China's last matriarchal society for the last two years and is continuing in 2014 with several expeditions. The Moso...

This is an older post which may contain outdated information. Our newest laptop battery, the V88 can be charged via USB-C. When a customer pointed us to this USB 5V to 15V boost circuit on eBay as a way to...