DIY

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...

Tutorial: Solar Power for Raspberry Pi This post will walk you though how to protect your Raspberry Pi while powering it from a solar-powered system, and provide some tips for reducing the power consumption....

Determining Solar Performance In this article we'll go over the differences in solar performance in cloudy, rainy, and sunny conditions. We put together photos of different days along with measurement of...

How do you protect the battery? The goal of a charge circuit is to protect both the battery and your device. If you don't have charge protection, you can damage the cells on a battery or cause a fire. Please...

How (and why) do I store power? Sunlight is inconsistent and often nonexistent (think nightime) so storing power is important in many applications. In addition, many electronics are expecting a constant,...

How much solar power am I generating? A solar panel does not do anything in isolation. It needs to be connected to something. That something is called a load. A load dissipates power and converts electrical...

How do Solar Chargers work? A solar charger is a portable power system made up of a solar panel and an external battery pack. For Voltaic Systems, we pair one of our high performance, monocrystalline solar...

How to DIY your own offgrid chicken coop lighting: Tom Mendise from Northeast Ohio has a 4'x4' chicken coop. He was looking for an offgrid chicken coop lighting system to keep hens laying as the days get...

Solar Panels for Small Motors In this guide we look at the options you have when deciding on solar panels for small motors starting with how to begin select the right panel for your motor. In general, we...

Particle Electron Power Consumption How much power does the Particle Electron consume? When designing a solar-powered IoT project, it is always important to have a good real-world sense for how much power...

Hi there folks, In this post, I'm going to talk about building a simple solar powered cloud-connected weather station using the Particle Electron. I'll also discuss the tradeoffs between the different power...

Solar Raspberry Pi for Environmental Management Manage nitrate and other environmental factors with solar Raspberry Pi for environmental management. Geoff Munn of WxOutside in Wellington, New Zealand...

This post explains to create a solar powered camera trap. We recently picked up a basic, simple to use camera trap from Stealth Cam (the STC-P12). We wanted to see if we could run the wildlife camera off of a...

DIY: Solar Powered Node for Garden Monitoring Garinger Gardens is a garden and education center in Charlotte, NC. Romell Sessoms and Brit Pair recently built a solar powered node for garden monitoring....

LittleBits are a set of small electronic toys that allow kids (and adult engineers like myself) to easily build electrical inventions. There are different types of power, input, and output components that can...

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.

Makers and engineers all over the world are using our solar panels to power their DIY microcontroller projects, but until recently no one had designed a printed circuit board and launched a successful...

Living off-the-grid in our modern-day society has never been easier. Our friend Tafline Layine from Inhabitat , recently used two of our 17 Watt Kits to make her car an off-grid space for living and...