Solar Power Aspire

I've been thinking about attaching a solar panel to the top of my aspire one... Anyone else think of this? Any ideas or thoughts?

I was thinking a 5"x7" flexible panel might work...

 

20volts at 2amps - that'll be a solar panel about 2x3 foot which would weight approx 10-12 pounds. Not to mention a regulator needed to make sure sudden bright sunlight doesn't do a surge and at night the AAO battery doesn't discharge into the panel.
Put you off yet ?

 

What about having one there to just trickle charge, not power it completely... It would be nice if while it's closed it can be sitting on the desk recharging. I would think it might give it some juice.

Anyone have any ideas about where to find a good panel for this type of project? I wanna give it a try

 

19V at 0.2amp will be just enough to power acer aspire one

 

you need 2 amps not "point 2" amps

 

Ever had a look at Voltaic Systems bags and chargers? The Voltaic Generator looks interesting, but I don't generally go for the messenger-type bags myself though.

 

4 watts?
More like 30+ watts.
Power consumption is in the area of 1.6 amps at 19 volts. Around 30 watts.
Certainly less without a hard drive but you still have to light the screen.

 

No,...i meant 0.2Amp. That's enough power to get acer aspire one going without lcd monitor, hdd and wifi at minimal load. With everything connected excluding the battery and speaker, AAO uses about 10W of energy or aroud (19v 0.5Amp). If you connect a battery, the netbook will some power to the battery. This can range from 0W-30W or even more.

The screen uses about 3W, the HDD uses about 2W, Wifi uses bout 1W on average. That leaves a 4W to power other things on AAO.

The max power consumption is about 30W. You will never reach that value if you're not charging the battery.

 

If i want to recharge the battery only? getting more battery time?

Getting 4 portable solar chargers with battery pack.

1 portable charger: with battery 1000mAh, output: 5,5V and 700mA

How will 4 of this charger increase the battery life?

 

With all due respect (nice start of my very first post :? ),... but why always try to cut down someones ideas.

I actually think it might be possible to at least extend the working life of the 751 by some hours when using some nice solar power stuff.
And all you screaming high wattage... where do you get these ideas from, what i can find out (by simple mathematics) is:
Acer One 751H 6 Cell Battery (the standard i got with it) is 11,1V 4400mAh or 46Wh
46Wh!! so this battery can give 46 Watts, one hour long.
I don't know about you guys but my 751 can run for like 6 hours of hard drive movie playback (backlight turned way down).
That means 46Wh / 6h = 7,7 W power usage when playing back a movie from hard drive.

So gaining some running hours with solar power would be possible for sure, biggest problem this idea calls up is the power input, you would not be able to supply the laptop with some power because then the laptop would want to run the pc charge the battery and do all that as quick as possible, thus requiring the 19V 1,58A (30Watt) of the power supply.

But if you're a electronics expert, it would certainly be possible to get the power out of a solar cell and get it to assist the battery...

 

Hey,

Power usage of the AAO is variable depending on charge cycle, hard drive activity, wi-fi being active, etc, etc.

I *do* know that my AAO when running, using the wi-fi and bluetooth dongle, and doing some pretty hard core apps with a bunch of hard drive access, pulls approx 30 to 35 watts (according to the APC UPS software) . This seems about right. When it is just charging the battery, (i.e. powered down, just charging) it pulls about 14 watts. With it up and running but doing "light" activity (watching a movie, not charging the battery) it's pulling about 18-20 watts. Brightness on the screen only varies it by about 4 watts top to bottom (not like my old toughbook... whew!).

 

A couple of things

First these netbooks don't really need a full 19v unless you are trying to charge the battery, they run just fine on 12V *if* you bypass battery charging circuit. The easiest way to do that would be using an old battery, tear the guts out of it and hook 12V to the connector where the batteries used to hook to. I'll be using mine in a boat with touchscreen and tablet PC mods and I am seriously thinking of rigging it up this way so I don't need a switchmode power supply adapter to jump the 12v up to 19v just so the internal charger can take it back down to 12 V which is exactly what happens when you run it off AC with the battery removed (Which is recommended by Acer when you aren't using the battery as the main voltage supply).

The reason I am doing it this way is to make the unit more energy efficient by bypassing the losses in two circuits, the upconverting 12V t0 19V power supply external to the Acer and the internal dropdown supply internal to the Acer

Like the gentleman earlier said, on battery power alone this thing runs at less than 10 watts (More like 7-8W) even pressed fairly hard, the differences the other guy was measuring is due to losses in the AC supply and the internal dropdown regulator which look to be considerable, almost as much ... or more ... than the Acer's <10W usage.

 

I can't argue with any of this... plugged in the power supply by itself and it was pulling 10w... with no computer attached... if you attach, and then charge (even off and on) that would bring it up some... too bad I don't have a reliable way to test how much wattage without going through the ac lines... but this seems like an intriguing idea. I have a couple of small solar chargers, I may play with them to see about getting a rig set up (not inside the case, mind, just charging)

 

After I tear mine apart to make a bunch of mods, and get a look and backtrace the power supply circuits to see what my options are I plan on characterizing the power supply and efficiency. I also have a couple of solar panels in parallel that came from on of those solar units for maintaining a 12V car battery. it puts out about 4-5W out at about 17.5-18V in full sunlight before the 'amplified zener' regulator and about 14V after which I use to extend my boat batteries life when I'm out fishing for more than a day where there are no electricity available at the campsite(Usually an island in the middle of the river) and as a maintenance charger for the battery over the winter. Since the regulator I built is adjustable I plan on eventually messing around with it on an Acer One (I have a 531h with the WWAN modem card and 6 cell battery) but that's a couple of months down the road. I'll start tearing the Acer One down and modding it sometime next week but I don't when exactly I'll be charactorizing the power supply and charge circuits.

I'm blogging this project as I go along so you may want to check that out from time to time

http://netbook2chartplotter.blogspot.com/

Don't forget to feed my albino catfish