Side Project: Solar Cell Phone

An example of a solar cell.

Well, this is somewhat of an update. A side project that I've been working on for a little bit has been an attempt at running my cell phone off solar power. I ordered some photovoltaic (solar) cells off www.plastecs.com that will amount to a total of 10 cells, each rated at 0.5 volts and 700 mA (milli-amps). This will give me a combined cell potential of 5 volts at .7 amps, which is about the standard charging specifications for my cell phone, which is the LG Voyager. I have already stripped the connections off a USB charger for my cell phone which gave me the positive and negative terminals that I will need to connect them to the solar cells when they arrive. When they do, I will post an update specifying whether they worked or not and if they did, how you can do it yourself. NOTE: Powering your phone off solar power is not only for the LG Voyager. You can power any phone off solar, but you need to know the proper voltage and amperage that it takes to charge your phone. That information should be located on the back of your phone's charger.

ALSO... I will be posting an update for the hydrogen production experiments as soon as I get some platinized electrodes. Unfortunately, nothing else seems to have worked thus far, so it is my last resort. However, I may try stainless steel before I go to platinum, but I do not know if it will stand up to the intense oxidizing conditions of electrolysis.

If you notice at the top of my site, I now have a link for the Power4ThePresent official toolbar! It is an internet toolbar with a search engine, links page, RSS feed page, customizable internet radio player, weather information, a link to this site, and much more. Please download it, as it's a great toolbar that I use myself. It works fine on firefox and internet explorer.

As always, if you have questions/comments, please feel free to post them. I won't call you dumb or make your suggestions feel insignificant :)