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I’ve always been fascinated by solar power. It’s leccy from the sun! That’s cool! I’ve also always been fascinated by LEDs. Stuff that lights up is ALWAYS cool to at least some minor degree. With this in mind you can see why a £2.99 solar powered garden light in Poundstretcher was purchased fairly quickly.

Here’s my plan: glorious sunshine in, cool LED light out. I could hack it to suck light from outside and put it indoors. The problem is that this gizmo is just too small, I need to scale up a bit (but not to ‘big’, more from ‘pico’ to ‘nano’).

With a bit of prodding from Sarah, and after some eBay searching I settled on a 12 Volt, 5 Watt solar panel which wasn’t too expensive. It looks a bit (well, a lot) like this:

That’s it sat on one of the front window sills. The solar panel will get hooked up to a big arse battery (arriving soon) to charge up during the day and power (initially) some lights at night.

There are are a couple of minor issues here:

• I live in Edinburgh, and Scotland isn’t famed for it’s glorious sunshine. But it has been very sunny for at least two days this year and until rain power is cracked it’s probably the most reliable environmentally friendly power source around.
• I’m on the second floor so this is going to have to sit on a window sill and only get sunlight for half of the day.

Neither of these issues are going to stop me, I’ve done stupider things that have worked!

And, just to prove you can get something out of a solar panel in Edinburgh…

That’s an RGB LED lit by solar power, bask in it’s brightness! There were resistors involved, I’m actually quite hopeful about getting some useful juice out of the panel, I measured 23 V open circuit and the short circuit current was 130 mA.

We’ll see what happens when the battery arrives. I’ve got a book out of the library that might help a touch: Solar Electricity: A Practical Guide to Designing and Installing Small Photovoltaic Systems. It’s actually got some handy stuff in it, it’s a book aimed at the practicalities of installing a low cost system using simple parts and tools. This appeals to me.

I’ll let you know how it goes when more bits arrive!