Category Archives: solar panel

DIY Vs. Commercially Made Solar Panel

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The price of commercially made solar panels on eBay is around $1 per watt and have been for a few years, but the price of individual solar cells are likewise at a low price per watt, around $0.48.  Looking at those prices, it’s tempting to say that it’d be cheaper to just buy the solar cells and put together your own panels. But is it? Simply adding up all the costs might seem like a good way to tell, but you’d need to make a panel to really see what works and what doesn’t.

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Chiptunes on a Solar Panel

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With its vintage sound, there’s no mistaking the unique 8-bit sound of video games from the 80s and 90s. It became so popular that eventually sparked its own genre of music known as “chiptune” for which musicians are still composing today. The music has some other qualities though, namely that it’s relatively simple from a digital standpoint. [Robots Everywhere] found that this simplicity made it perfect as a carrier for wireless power transmission.

The project acts more like a radio transmitter and receiver than it does a true wireless power transmitter, but the principle is the same. It uses a …read more

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Critical Flaws Found in Solar Panels Could Shut Down Power Grids

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A Dutch security researcher has uncovered a slew of security vulnerabilities in an essential component of solar panels which could be exploited to cause widespread outages in European power grids.

Willem Westerhof, a cybersecurity researcher at Dutch security firm ITsec, discovered 21 security vulnerabilities in the Internet-connected inverters – an essential component of solar panel that

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Solar-Powered Prosthetic Skin

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One of the biggest problems for prosthetic users is feel. If you’ve ever tried to hold a pen and write with a numb hand, you’ve realised how important feedback is to the motor control equation. Research is ongoing to find ways to provide feedback from prosthetic limbs, in even a basic format.  The human nervous system is a little more complex than just interfacing with the average serial UART. One of the requirements of many feedback systems is power, which usually would involve bulky batteries or some form of supercapacitors, but a British team has developed a way to embed …read more

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Portable Battery Bank Only Looks Like a Bomb

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If one of the design goals of [wsw4jr]’s portable solar battery bank build was to make something that the local bomb squad would not hesitate to detonate with a water cannon if he leaves it unattended, then mission accomplished.

We kid, but really, the whole thing has a sort of “Spy vs. Spy” vibe that belies its simple purpose. A battery bank is just an array of batteries, some kind of charge controller, and an inverter. The batteries are charged by any means possible – in this case by a small array of solar panels. The mains output of the …read more

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