A primary building block in BEAM robotics is the Solar Engine, a very simple two transistor circuit originally designed by Mark Tilden, which allows energy to be stored in a capacitor, until the charge is sufficient to briefly run a tiny motor. This means you can easily make a solar powered mechanical device `live` with
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just a small solar panel in far less than direct sunlight - as long as you don`t need continuous movement. Powered by a Solar Engine, your device will be active in short bursts, with pauses in between. The length of a pause is determined by the available solar current. The original Solar Engine has the advantage of extreme simplicity, but also a few disadvantages. One of them is the way it achieves reset. This happens only when the load almost completely discharges the capacitor. Depending on your type of device, this may waste energy because the motor stops long before the capacitor is fully discharged, or reset may not be achieved at all, because the device is incapable of discharging the capacitor to a sufficiently low level. I used a circuit much like the Solar Engine to switch the Photovore on and off, the most important change being a reset independent of load. The Canadian BEAMer Ken Huntington took my circuit and changed it into a more efficient Solar Engine. Below you find his diagram and his description of it. He also supplied some oscilloscope images of the circuit in operation. Enjoy! A `micro power solar engine` has been a goal since my introduction to BEAM Robotics. I believe that if there wasn`t one before, I there is one now. What I`m presenting to you looks very similar to one of the circuits found in Steven Bolt`s web pages. As you will see, I made only minor changes to that design and not without help. My...
This project fits more for custom made battery casing that can have more space to hide things inside. This switch with few alterations can be used for any other project as well but is designed based on e-bike needs! This project use a clever functionality of....
The circuit described here uses ultrasonic oscillations and operates based on the propagation velocity of these oscillations in the air. Thus, we can easily determine the distance of two points if the time within which the wave travels this distance is....
Sometimes the precious metals are hidden too deep and are not detected except with complicated devices. In many cases, however, small pieces of precious metal buried near the surface can be detected by relatively simple means. Everyone is very attractive to....
Many times for various reasons we forget or can not water the plants that we have in our homes. And many humidity sensors units just notify us with a beeping sound or with a flashing light, that the pot needs watering. But what if we are away from home? This....
The principle behind a metal detector is really very simple. Proof of this is the circuit that follows, in which it proves that the construction of a metal detector can be done in the minute, with few components that we find very easily everywhere. With the....
The sub-harmonic bass generator is a sound producing unit for guitars. The sound it produces looks very much like that of the bass guitar. The octave generator is sometimes quite unusual since it does not produce any of the usual ways of coloring the sound,....
In the past the sounding (sea bottom measurement) was done with the "bullet", that is, with a heavy lead object that the seamen plucked into the sea hung from a calibrated rope. As soon as the "bullet" reached the bottom, the depth appeared directly from the....
This Amplifier was designed to have the following specifications: Distortion less than 0.1% at full power of 100W even at 20KHz. Power has to be attributed to an extended bandwidth. The output transistors must be protected against short circuits. The power....
A series of LEDs serve to alert the gardener when plants need water. Using two conventional digital integrated LEDs and a series of LEDs, we make a very useful device for gardening. The device detects the amount of water in the pot and alerts the grower.....
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