PV Gap

Ricky Said:

i want to power my camera charger using solar panels. how can i do it. tell me specs,tech etc?

We Answered:

You need to find out what is voltage and peak current required to charge camera. Assuming the camera uses DC electricity, then simply multiply (voltage x current) the numbers to compute the power that is required. This is the power specification (the amount of power generated) for your solar panel. Voltage will definitely be in units of V; if the units is A, then the computed power is in W; if the current is in units of mA, then the computed power is mW (or 1/1000 W). The voltage is the other specification for your solar panel. You don't need to exactly match the wattage and voltage spec, but the panel should have voltage and power larger than what you get from calculations.

This is the formula for a simple solar panel with no power maximizer. There are units called power maximizer that will that will convert the solar panel voltage/current to another set of voltage/current that matches you needs. If you choose to use a solar maximizer, you do not need to match the voltage, but you will still need to match the power. The result of using a power maximizer would allow you to shrink the size of by 10-30%, but for this application, it is not worth the effort.

You can get the voltage information directly from the wall-charger that comes with the camera. The information you are looking for is the "DC output voltage". If, on the wall-charger, it is written "AC output voltage" then probably unlikely that you will be able to use a solar panel, because the solar panel will generate DC output. If you want to still try, at the risk of damaging your camera, then use the same formula to calculate power but divide the final answer by 2. Use the "AC output voltage" number as your voltage specification. If you charge by plugging the camera into your computer, then the voltage spec you are looking for is 5V.

To get the current level required to charge the camera, it will be more challenging. The wall-charger will give a specification for the output current (right next to the "DC output voltage"), but this probably be 10x larger than what is used to charge the battery. You can still use this to calculate power for your solar panel, without any risk of damage to your camera, but you will have a solar panel 10x bigger than you really need. An alternative way to estimate the current is to get capacity of the battery in units of mA-h. Also, get the information from the manual or your own observation, as to how long (in hours) it takes to charge the battery from full discharge. The current (in units of mA) is obtained by dividing the battery capacity by the by the time it take to charge the camera.