I’m pretty new to electronics. I have an arduino uno and I’m wanting to measure some stuff outside. I saw that recent post about project boxes, I’m using one of those. But I was wondering about how to add solar to my project, because I think that would allow it to last longer than just a battery. Is there a good place to start for building a solar based project?
Welcome @Surtly, do you already have a working prototype with the sensors you want to have and whatever you are using to log your data? It would probably be worth getting everything working on a battery pack first and figuring out your power requirements before looking into getting solar power working, you might be surprised how long a battery pack might last if you only need infrequent samples, etc.
That being said, there is a popular instructables that I had bookmarked that has some good information on it and could help getting an idea of how much power you could expect, etc.
Either way I encourage you to create a Build Log for your project, I’m sure others would love to see the project develop and there are some smart people here who can really give you some great feedback and advice.
Here’s the link to the instructables:
I think Stephen is spot on, you should have a battery based prototype first even if it’s a bank of akaline AAs. From there, you can start to figure out your power requirements.
Also if you look into other versions of Arudino, you can probably save power as well.
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