aluminum tape again
Auto brake light
Back hoe log splitter
Black tape and PVC cement
Broken gas can cap
C-band dish solar furnace
Making a Cheap battery State Of Charge gauge more accurate
Cleaning the corroded buss bars from a Prius battery pack
Fixing small plastic gears
Forever solar desk lamp
How I splice audio cables
IMA motor coil shift in collision
Insight Battery pack turbo cooler
Insight Oil Pan second chance
Lifting the battery safely
making a ducted blower from a computer fan
Making an isolated hall effect current sensor with ring terminals
making a heavy workbench mobile
Making a simple IMA bypass connector from an old pack relay board
Making some custom solar panels
Measuring resistance of less than 1 ohm
Motorizing a snow blower chute
Put your exercize to good use?
Quick way to make a connector for checking the subpacks
Reading the blink codes
Real time external MPG display
Rear view Video cameras
Solar headlight
Soldering iorn degausser
Some uses of laser pointers
Taking Video of the dash
Those useful Prius subpacks
Using digital caliper to measure hole center to center distance
weed whacker motor converted to bicycle motor
When cleaning the EGR does not fix the hesatation
Where do you find high quality alligator clips?
Handy use for Aluminum tape.

Making some custom solar panels

Making some custom solar panels
Grabbing some sunlight

Bare solar cells are brittle, hard to make reliable connections to,only output 0.5V and need a cover to protect them if used outdoors.
I picked up some cute solar cells that were designed to be used in outdoor solar powered night lights. They are actually a complete solar panel. They will output 4.7V with no load, and at their max current of ~85MA, the voltage is about 3.2V.
The cells have plated copper flat wire terminals, and are pretty rugged. A guy in Foxboro MA is selling them on e-bay right now.
Engine room

I found that 4 cells in series will start and run two small 50ma@12V fans.
Made an air cooled garden hat for Sue.
Next I wanted to run a 4" 12V fan , so I took a 1/8" thick piece of PVC sheet and glued 8 of the cells to it with silicone calk. This panel puts out 165ma and develops ~8V across the 250MA fan, which runs it nicely, but not at full power.
I then made a new panel for my solar power demo hat, which has 3 4" fans. The panel will not run the fans alone, but will charge the NIMH 1100MAH AA cells that are embedded into the hat. The panel outputs ~400MA and will allow several hours of runtime.
The final panel is a reconfigurable output 22.5 Watt panel. Each string of 7 cells outputs 32V OC @ 85ma, and is terminated at the terminal area.
The available configurations:
256V @ 85mA
128V @170mA
64V @340mA
32V @680mA
The price of ~$4.12/Watt is not cheap compared to larger ready made panels, but the voltage range of 3.2 to 4.5V allows a single cell to power a pic microcontroller, and the ease of use and mounting allow custom panels to be made in any configuration you like.
Next project is to connect the 256V panel to the Insight HV pack for parking lot topping off and re balancing of the battery charge.
More on this project :
Plugging into the sun blog
When putting series strings of cells in parallel with other series strings, each string should have a diode to assure that back conduction does not take place.