Solar Power and Supercapacitors

#1

I would like to power my blinds with solar panels, although, it can be expensive and complicated as far as circuitry and hardware goes. Charging batteries and maintaining a proper charge requires a charge controller. Batteries themselves can be expensive and unreliable in certain environments. They take longer to charge, are heavy, and dangerous to a certain extent.

I have an idea to make a simple circuit with nothing more than a 5-6v solar panel, a diode, 6v supercap, and the blinds controller. The requirements of the supercaps would be at least 1 amp peak but very low idle. In a 24 hour day each unit will only peak twice for a few seconds. Open and close. The rest of the day it is just idling which is so low, my mobile chargers cant detect the current draw and turn off in a few seconds.

The next steps are to choose the solar panels, supercaps, and a suitable diode. Im sure the cost per unit will be under $10 in parts. Any thoughts or comments are appreciated. So… What do you think? Can it work?

#2

I have not tried this yet but can confirm that in other sensor applications I have this all-in-one board hooked up to a 6V solar panel and to an 18650 battery. I have one of the outputs powering a Wemos and another powering a 5V relay switch. It works as intended and I get enough sun in my area that the battery could run for months…or longer. BUT - the question is whether the 5V 2A output would be enough to power the servo motor for the blinds controller?

There are also two great videos by Andreas Spiess (the guy with the swiss accent) on this very part and I credit him with the detailed research and testing.

Check out https://www.aliexpress.com/item/ESP32-ESP32S-For-Wemos-For-Raspberry-Pi-18650-Battery-Charge-Shield-Board-V3-Micro-USB-Port/32870411748.html?spm=a2g0s.13010208.99999999.259.3df43c00ToLegL

Maybe it is more than you want, but I found that the comparable parts were more costly individually than the sum of this one part and for that I work around the form factor to make it fit my projects.

#3

Has there been any progress in the solar panel search and this solution ?

#4

No, not on my end.I tested with batteries and found the idling consumed more juice than I had anticipated. A “wake on LAN” would work nice. For the most part, the blinds may only move twice in one day cycles.The circuit doesn’t really need to be on idling all day to be functional.

#5
#6

Hmmm, you would think this would be a relatively simple challenge to champion. I’ve found a number of DIY solar cells with battery packs that I’m going to try and affix to this when it arrives.

Do you know what the normal shipping time is for this site ?

#7

Mine took awhile… but that was a couple years ago…

#8

thank you. I just received the email that these have shipped. Can’t wait to get them and begin playing around with them.