[pct-l] solar woes

[Arno Holschuh]

I looked at all of this for my sattelite radio (cubs fan, this is our year, can't afford to miss the season, etc). A good friend who has Actually Done This Sort Of Thing Before had the following advice:
1 Find out what kind of battery it is. If it is a lithium ion battery, be very, very careful, as they are the ones that blow up. 
2 Find out if the device being recharged has a power shutoff function. Cell phones, for example, apparently do; they stop charging when they've charged enough. Some cheap appliances have a timer that simply stops the charging circuit after x number of seconds. Truly cheap things have no shutoff (ouch), but your shutoff MAY be in the charger itself. 
3 Find out how many volts the wall (or car) charger is delivering, so you know what the camera is supposed to be taking. The charger will say this. My sattelite radio's delivers 5v, for example; the charger I was (but am no longer seriously) looking at delivered 5.5v. This was apparently right.
4 Overshoot by a smidge. Solar chargers don't usually deliver what they promise unless you are in full sunlight all the time. Obviously, you may well be in full sunlight for a long time in the very near future. But he had done his solar panel installation on a certain dry lake bed at 4,000 feet in Nevada, and it still delivered significantly less than it was supposed to. 

It all got too complicated for me to futz with. Not saying I won't refutz later, but... FM is a lot easier :)
 
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