Solar lighting for camper

picked up a few solar landscape lights at lowes today.

I’m going to put the solar panels in the windows of my camper, for some backup/low maintenance interior lighting.

any ideas on improving this circuit, or should i just put a decent battery plus a cree in it and otherwise leave it as is?

Its simple boost LED driver (20-30mA) like joule theif. boost 1.2V cell voltage to 3-4V
this driver not enough for cree (I mean XPG, XPE etc…).

My idea:
use 3x 1.2V batteries in series and one 7135 to drive powerful LED.
you can use 3 solar cells in series to charge 3x1.2V batteries.

that’s a great idea, I didn’t know they could be wired serially

won’t i need some sort of charge controller though?

These are Ni-cd or Ni-mh batteries so you can charge them without charge controller.
most solar lamps use them without any charge controller. add diode to block reverse voltage. ( like stock board has)

great thanks

Another possibility (which is seen with MANY solar lights) is to use LiFePO4 rather than Nicad/NiMH. The advantage here is that the battery produces 3.2V rather than 1.2V. This results in simplified circuitry and higher output due to not being limited by a boost driver.

Why use a battery that will eventually wear out!

Supercapacitor in a sun jar

https://www.tindie.com/products/rtpreppers/infinity-supercapacitor-solar-sun-jar-unit/

This is from the same guy I got the 12Vdc lead acid desulfator OSHPark boards from

both good ideas, but i’ve already spent too much on an old vintage camper (can’t shine shtuff, but you can paint it), and I have lots of AA nimh

The camper has a propane light, AC lights, 12V light, generator, deep cycle battery, and solar panel, so these are sort of mood/backup lighting

in an extended emergency/disaster, if the lighting fails, I’ll get some sleep :slight_smile: