Solar Charger Project

I wanted to make my own solar charger and finally got around to collecting some stuff for my concept project. The solar cells I raided from 99 Cent store when they had solar gardening lights at .99 each and a large solar cell one from solar cell phone charger that was broken by accident maliciously.

The primary phase of this project is combining the solar cells to create a large, more powerful solar cell to deliver the higher voltage necessary to charge a 12v lead acid battery (scavenged from an AT&T universal power supply).

So far I am able to yield 19vDC from the array of seven solar cells which isn’t bad. What I will need to work on next though is a charging circuit that would bump up the voltage but not allow overcharging or allow voltage to escape. Since I intend to want to charge my iPhone or iPad I will also need to add a circuit to the USB receptacle to fool the data pins on the devices into thinking they are in a real product charger.

If not then any iPhone device I try to charge will show a message that the device is not supported by the charger. I will add more pictures as this project progresses.

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