Arduino + Solar + Lipo + Bluetooth

[wlanboy]

Sneak Preview of my next Arduino project.

This project is about a solar powered Arudino which is controlled via Bluetooth.



First step is a OLED display that can be controlled with a basic serial communication protocol.



I will add some LEDs, a realtime clock (battery buffered), etc, later.

It will be quite a work to polish the c++ and Ruby code.

And writing everything down too - so this will take some time.

Looking forward for suggestions of "things that should be controllable via Bluetooth".

 

[dano]

Nice -- I happen to be a solar Arduino guy, starting with a sun tracker for a small solar array, and self powered with solar also of course for the cpu itself. I went to radio shack, and didn't see any solar cells I was looking for(kids kit worked at first, just pricey for the lack of power) -- ended up using the solar cells that are found on the common walkway lighting systems, and those can be had for super cheap, it's just the labor to remove them that sucks(with the added by product of an LED and light sensor though).

Once the cells are removed though, I simply wired them in series and then in parallel to get the juice I needed, and then silicon glued the assembled array to a piece of plexi-glass, with the one way diode of course.

Two years later, and my ghetto panel is still going strong, and is now being used to exhaust hot air from a greenhouse, hooked up to a few 120mm case fans. Sure would love to have more automation, and recently found the "Garduino" project, which I now wanna try out, and of course, would love to have another idea of how to run my arduino.

At the moment, I am not sure what kind of BT devices I would like to see used, but I am sure the gears will be working today to find something.

 

[drmike]

What are you cobbling?

Interested since come summer, the solar Pi is short on my list of to-do projects.

 

[peterw]

Nice setup. How much power is the Arduino consuming? I found a blog which states: Power = 5v * 46.5mA = 232.5mW.

0.2W per hour or 5.5W per day. Your solar panel looks like the 1W solar panel from seeedstudio if I compare sizes with the Arduino. Please post the part list.

 

[mtwiscool]

Nice setup. How much power is the Arduino consuming? I found a blog which states: Power = 5v * 46.5mA = 232.5mW.

0.2W per hour or 5.5W per day. Your solar panel looks like the 1W solar panel from seeedstudio if I compare sizes with the Arduino. Please post the part list.

i got a 15 watt solar panel.

 

[peterw]

i got a 15 watt solar panel.

How small is it? Where did you buy it?

 

[gxbfxvar]

How much power is the Arduino consuming?

In general, plain Arduino UNOr3 (5V) draws 18mA..~45mA depending on the running mode (normal, idle, sleep, standby). Older Duemilanove consumes slightly less, thanks to different USB-UART chipset (ftdi). Some Arduino clones can consume even as little as 0.02mA (20 uA/microamps).

Some (of my) old blog articles about the subject can be found from http://arduino.ada-language.com/saving-power-with-avr-ada.html and http://arduino.ada-language.com/saving-power-with-avr-ada-part-2-power-down-mode-and-watchdog.html

And for power efficient communication, I would use either Zigbee/XBees or Bluetooth Low Energy (LE/4.0/Smart).