Dollhouse/Mini Solar Powered LEDs

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xantee8
 
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Dollhouse/Mini Solar Powered LEDs

Post by xantee8 »

Looking for advice/help in creating a project to make a solar powered dollhouse. This is for a group of elementary aged home schooled girls who already have a pretty sweet homemade dollhouse. What materials and tools (ideally from adafruit website) would I need to create this project? Thanks in advance for the advice!

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Franklin97355
 
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Re: Dollhouse/Mini Solar Powered LEDs

Post by Franklin97355 »

Could you post more details such as size, number of LEDs wanted, access to solar (is this inside or out how much sun will it get, things like that)?

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xantee8
 
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Re: Dollhouse/Mini Solar Powered LEDs

Post by xantee8 »

We live in Guatemala City where solar insolation is between 4.6-5.9 kWh/m2/day. The dollhouse is inside, but we will want to remove the panels & place in the sun daily and then place on the dollhouse in the evening. (Not how real panels on a house work, but probably the best option). For size we would like to make just 1 LED per mini-panel (and we will build multiple 1 LED units - about 6 units), so each child can build their own.

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: Dollhouse/Mini Solar Powered LEDs

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

Sounds like you'll want a solar battery charger: https://www.adafruit.com/products/390

That charges a LiPo battery, which you can then use for whatever you want. The charger works with any of our solar panels:

https://www.adafruit.com/categories/67

and any of our LiPo cells:

https://www.adafruit.com/categories/138

The charger is made so you can leave the battery connected at all times and connect or disconnect the load. We have JST connectors that will plug directly into the charger's LOAD jack:

https://www.adafruit.com/products/261

but those can be kind of hard to pull out. We also have 2.1mm barrel jacks and plugs with screw terminals on the other side:

https://www.adafruit.com/products/368
https://www.adafruit.com/products/369

which make for nice, easily plugged and unplugged connections.

For the amount of light you're getting even a small solar panel should be able to charge one of the 2500mAh LiPo packs in a day, and that would give you lots of power to play with overnight. The average LED uses about 25mA, and a 2500mAh pack would be able to run 10 of them for 9-10 hours before needing to be recharged.

We're all about the blinky here at Adafruit, so even our bare LED section has a pretty good assortment:

https://www.adafruit.com/categories/90

There are a couple 25-packs of white LEDs (clear and diffused) that you could use for general room lighting (celing or lamp).

We also have kind of a thing for buttons and switches:

https://www.adafruit.com/categories/235
https://www.adafruit.com/categories/155

and we have a pushbutton power switch kit that would be a good beginner's soldering project:

https://www.adafruit.com/products/1400

A project like this would also be a good excuse to get one of our 3v Pro Trinket microcontroller boards:

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2010

and let the girls get started programming the connections between switches and lights. Then they could do things like fade lights in and out rather than just turning them on and off, create patterns, etc.

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xantee8
 
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Re: Dollhouse/Mini Solar Powered LEDs

Post by xantee8 »

Thank you!

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