[Swansea Hackspace] Solar Panel Battery Charging

[Alice Mitchell]

On Fri, 2020-07-17 at 09:38 +0000, EBA Consulting Ltd wrote:
> Hi
> 
> 
> I have designed a system with 3 sensors (Temp,Light and level) they
> run from an Arduino- wifi unit. I have powered it using a 9v PP3
> battery.
> 
> 
> The system will be located outside the property but in range of wi-
> fi.  There is no power so I would like to use a re-chargeable 9v
> battery connected to a solar panel to keep it topped up.
> 
> 
> I am looking for help to provide a hardware design solution to
> achieve this

I would be curious to know what Arduino board you are using, a lot of
the standard ones used a linear voltage regulator for the power supply
which will waste a lot of power and might make the power consumption
too high to be practical for long term solar power.

Have you seen projects like this one ?
https://www.instructables.com/id/Solar-Powered-WiFi-Weather-Station-V20/

They use a Wemos D1 Mini as the microcontroller (its an ESP8266 dev
board), powered by a standard LiIon battery, connected to one of those
off the shelf lithium charging boards like we stock in the space and a
solar panel.