Hello World
After a couple of weeks of serious tinkering, I’m ready to announce my next adventure: Bootstrap Solar. You can read more about this project in the About page, and if you want some background, see the Origins page.
My first product is a portable solar-powered USB charger for charging phones and other small USB-powered devices on the go. While there are similar commercial offerings out there, they’re either over-priced or under-powered (or both). My goal is to produce something that is both affordable and powerful enough to be practical, and to use bleeding-edge technologies to bootstrap the whole thing with no official funding.
I said I’ve been working on this for a couple of weeks. So to bring y’all up to date, here’s what I’ve got so far (pics soon):
- found Open Source circuit board designs I can repurpose
- built a proof-of-concept version
- learned how to use Eagle CAD for drawing schematic diagrams, and designing circuit boards
- ordered prototype circuit boards to be made
- found a supplier for 6V solar panels, and ordered samples
- found a supplier for LiPoly batteries, and ordred samples
- started designing an enclosure using SketchUp
The first step is to build a fully functional and presentable prototype using components as close to “production” versions as possible. Once that’s done, I’ll start a KickStarter project to raise funds. The main delay right now is in manufacturing and shipping. The slowest part is having PCBs (printed circuit boards) made because I’m using BatchPCB, which is cheap but takes about a month. Faster services cost hundreds of dollars, and are beyond my budget, at least until I raise some funds. For the prototype, though, I’m going to use off-the-shelf circuits from SparkFun and AdaFruit, so all that’s left is to design/print the enclosure, and wait for the battery samples to arrive.
