There's some interesting information there, but it's buried in 20 pages of nonsense. I liked the part about power supplies and solar cells, but a 61 to 100W solar system built around AMD dual cores is kind of crazy. After 13 pages you get to them installing Vista and know you are in the land of the loony. It cost $1,000 before they bought software or solar cells ... Skip directly from the last page about power supplies to the article about solar cells:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/technical-foundations-diy-solar-powered-pc,1693.html Here's a spoiler, they spent another $5,000 (or so they said, they said they spent $3,800 total). You might also want to skip the 14 pages of "turntable" details, which are unworthy of their big budget. Page 16 picks up with interesting wiring details. Given the cost of solar cells per watt, specialty laptops and other low power equipment are the only sane choices. The people at LSU's Physics lab probably know better but the cost I see online is about $10/per watt. That's about what they paid for their cells and at that price, a 30W or less laptop starts to look very attractive. The 3.5 watt system, http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5010953811.html is particularly good, better than a Zaurus. This reduces both the storage and cell requirements by a factor of 20, so an 18 watt cell becomes practical and a regular car battery looks like overkill. On Thursday 11 September 2008, Petri Laihonen wrote: > I guess this would be one pointer to start with..... > > Do-It-Yourself Solar-Powered PC: Hardware : A New Desktop PC Power > Consumption World Record: 61 Watts > http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hardware-components,1685.html > > Petri _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://mail.brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net
