It looks like this test is over now. The TabletKiosk MP3400 blew up on me.

This morning, everything was going well. The MP3400 was charging well from the Sunlinq...

...but later in the day, when I was charging the Q1 Ultra from the MP3400, it all went wrong. The MP3400 overheated in a big way...

I had left the Q1 Ultra connected to the MP3400 in the boot/trunk of the car while I went out to pick up some beer and when I came back the unit was incredibly hot. When I took it out of it's case, it was clear that it had overheated as the plastic on the inside of the case had melted onto the battery. Part of the grille had melted too.

I left it to cool for 20 minutes and it looked like it was working again but it didn't last long. Its completely dead now. No lights, nothing!

Lesson learned. Don't try and use the MP3400 in 32 degrees heat inside the protective case, inside the boot of a car.

Fortunately the Q1 Ultra is still working although i'm down to 60 minutes battery now. There's no way to charge it up until I get home on Saturday evening. Here ends another Solar-UMPC test. Now where's that beer I bought....

One year ago (see this post for details of the 2007 Solar UMPC tour kit,) I was using the setup below for my mobile blogging and tracking.

This year, its a lot simpler. And a lot more powerful. Notice how the phone, GPS tracker and Camera have merged into one device. Yes, the N82 is a real boon. The N82 camera is not as good as the S2  (as expected) but the ability to auto-tag while tracking and then post the images directly to a server over the Internet is a massive advantage.

You'll also notice a change in UMPC. I'm now using the Samsung Q1 Ultra (with XP and HSDPA) which has an SD slot (negating the need for any cables for the camera) and a much brighter, higher resolution screen. I've also moved to SSD rather than the traditional, spinning hard drive. Its safer. The keyboard (A Samsung Q1 keyboard) remains the same as there's still nothing out there that can beat it. You'll also see the USB LED lamp. Still, a key part of the kit!

Now lets look at the solar setup. This is the setup I used a year ago.

 

And this is the setup i'm going to use over the next four days while I go work/camping.

[The Wife and Kid are off camping together and I was due to stay home and work but I've decided to come along and make a working holiday of it. Dads - this is the beauty of Ultra Mobile PC's!!!]

 

 

I've removed the lead acid battery from the kit and am now direct charging the Tablet Kiosk MP3400. It only charges during peak hours (one full charge per 100% sunny day here in mid-summer Germany) where the SLA battery charges during less sunny periods but the amount of energy you get in those few extra hours is minimal. I've chosen to drop the SLA battery and use the MP3400 direct on the Sunlinq 25W solar panel.

Here's a post with more detail about using the two together. And a how-to video.

I'll probably post a few solar computing thoughts while I'm away so stay tuned here for more. Weather is looking good!

 
Last year on the Solar UMPC tour.

Labels: geotagging, mobile computing, N82, solar, umpc

SelectSolar in the UK have just emailed me to let me know that Voltaic have an improved Solar Bag solution. You might remember that I was considering a JuiceBag for the tour last year but in the end the idea was dropped because the wattage wasn't high enough. This solution from Voltaic bumps the wattage up to 17W by using a monocrystalline panel.

The Voltaic Generator is the first solar bag powerful enough to charge a laptop. It uses high efficiency solar cells to generate maximum power in the limited space available. It includes a battery pack custom designed to efficiently store and convert the electricity generated. It can also charge cell phones and most other hand held electronics.

At a recommended price of $599 you won't be buying one for the kids but for field-work this provides protection and charging in one neat solution.

SelectSolar will have these in stock soon.

MacRumors have just reported on a patent filed by Apple that shows how they see a possibility to integrate solar cells into the display panel.

Solar panels will have to get much more efficient and power-drain reduced down to the sub 5W range before this technique has legs for any form of general computing device. Screens are never used in direct sunlight and I'm sure that the LCD layer will reduce efficiency by a huge amount but considering that its one of the largest available areas on any portable device, it makes sense to start thinking about it for the future.

Source:Macrumors. Via Engadget.

Yes, its that time of year again where we get the first encouraging days of sunshine in Europe so I've been into the cellar and dusted-off my Sunlinq 24W solar panel.

 
Sun strength for the last 2.5 days.

 

I'm not planning a solar-umpc tour this year but I am planning to get some use out of the panel. At the moment, the plan is to run a UMPC from the solar panel that could serve this blog. I doubt i'll be able to do it 24/7 for the whole of summer but I'm running some tests on the Raon Digital Everun S6S at the moment to see exactly how much I could get out of it with the 24W panel.

The Everun, when configured for 400Mhz with WIfi and screen off, will consume a tiny 4W at idle and about 6W at full power which is about as low as you can go with a PC without having to switch to an ARM architecture. I don't want to do that because the plan is just to install a basic Ubuntu image, fire up Apache and SSH and serve this blog as a set of static web pages. WIthout Mysql or PHP running it should keep the processor load down to a minimum although i'm not sure that Ubuntu will be able to switch the CPU into 400Mhz mode. It might have to stay locked at 600Mhz.

At 5W drain, the server would need 120Wh of energy to power it for a full day. With a 24Wh panel I'm only going to get about 80-100Wh per day on average (using the 4-hours sun/day  rule that applies to this part of the world) so at some point, back-up power is going to be needed. The problem is, how can I switch-over to back-up power (or gracefuly switch over to another server.) Switching the servers is OK but getting the Everun to shutdown when it reaches 5% power is impossible under Linux right now.

The Alternative is to shut-down the server between 0300 and 0900 every day and to try and regulate it that way or just keep topping up the SLA battery from other sources when needed.

I'm going to need a couple of new items for this project though.

1) Power usage measurement tools. I want to feed the data back into the website. Power used, power given by panel, current battery level. Any tips there would be much appreciated. Should I buy a dedicated data logging system with software or are there simpler ways to do this.

2) An ethernet port. The Everun only has a WIfi connection and that would take too much power so I'm looking at a USB to Ethernet adaptor. This one from SMC takes about 150mw which will be fine.

3) Bigger SLA battery. Rather than using the 56whr battery that I have, I should get one that takes about 200wh so that if we have two or three good days of sunshine, I can store the engergy and use it on days where the sun is weaker.

Solar panel positioning is going to be a major problem at my house which is badly oriented for a solar panel. I'm also a bit worried about loss along the length of cable I will need in order to position the solar panel correctly.

Over the next few weeks I hope to at least have a partial solar-powered web server running but if this blog disappears, you'll know what's happened!

You might remember that on the Solar Tour last year I used RoboGeo and a Garmin Etrex to enable an internet based track and tagged photo stream. The Etrex would do the tracking and every time I stopped I would download the track, to a UMPC, download the images I'd taken and run them through RoboGeo which would match the timestamps on the images to the position at that time according to the track. I would then export a kml file which would be uploaded to my website and automatically pulled into my Google Map. It was about the easiest way to do it then (see my day-plan for more info on it) but a lot has changed now!

Recently I bought a Nokia N82 smartphone which has built in GPS. Google Maps has been great fun to play with on a phone and even more fun was the beta release of Nokia Maps 2.0 which added satellite imagery, internet search, live traffic and a pedestrian mode. The other application I found was the Nokia Sports tracker. This phone-based applciation does the same job as my old Etrex in that it logs data and shows statistics pretty much as the Etrex did. The best part of it though is that you can authorise the software to send data to an online Sportstracker account, live! Users accessing the current activity on the website can then see your location in real time overlayed on a Google Map. Fantastic! Once you've finished your activity the program then goes through your photos looking at the timestamps and offers to upload them all with GeoTags to the same Sportstracker service. With a few simple steps, the track is automatically overlayed with image pointers. Groovy!

Here's a public 'track' I made on SportsTracker.
http://sportstracker.nokia.com/nts/workoutdetail/index.do?id=74767

With one more step, you can export the KML file and import it into a Google MyMap thus breaking it out of the Nokia Sportstracker website and making it easier to share and add mroe info too. There's one more thing though. I didn't quite fancy my images being stored at the sportstracker website so I'm using Shozu to auto-tag and upload to Flickr. Using a great tip I picked up from TheNokiaBlog I found out how you can auto-link a geofeed from Flicker and have it show up live on a Google Map. The only thing missing is being able to auto-export the track in the same, live, way from Sportstracker online, or the Sportstracker app on the phone, to Google Maps. I'm sure that will come soon though as it seems like an obvious way to make live people-location mashups and create even more excitement over the location aware possibilities with Nokia phones.

Here's a map I prepared earlier!


View Larger Map

I'm sure that we'll see Nokia combining Maps2.0 and some form of live tracking soon. It would be so much fun to see where your friends are and what they're doing. Can you imagine that in a very short time we'll be able to link this into live personal video too for the ultimate GeoVideo experience!

One problem with all this is that it takes a lot of battery power from the phone. Where I was getting 20 hours from two AA batteries, the Nokia N82 will last for 3 hours if you set it up correctly using lower-power GSM-based data. If you use 3G data, your battery life will suffer even more and you'll see soemthing less than 1.5 hours. You might need to take a spare phone with you or turn off the live upload feature which will give you all-day tracking. Even if you upload every time you take a break, its a lot easier than using the manual process I was using before.

Goodbye Garmin Etrex! Goodbye Robo Geo!

Labels: geotagging, N82, sportstracker

It looks like Voltaic will be releasing a 14w solar panel bag, a huge step up from their, largely useless, at least for UMPCs, 4W bad. I hope its not a typo as the three-panel setup look exactly the same as before.

If it really is 14W then I'm interested. Well almost. The design is a little on the ugly side and the price of $559 means I could actually buy a stack of spare Li-ion batteries that, charged, would run a UMPC or one of the new Menlow-based MIDS showing up at CES for a few weeks or more!

This story is from CNet and the author mention in the article that they will be running a story about solar laptops soon. That should be interesting and one to look out for.

Thanks to Matt for the tip.