ENTER RAFFLE

We’ll make things better the second time around, and PowerFilm has certainly delivered on that with this week’s kit. A while back we reviewed the company’s Indoor Solar Development Kit, but now we’re onto the Indoor/Outdoor Solar Development Kit, the company’s first with “inside-out” capabilities.

This, of course, starts with the panels. There are two different panels here, the MPT2.4-21 panels of the PowerFilm Classic Application Series and the LL200-2.4-37 indoor panels, both of which are based on amorphous silicon material – the same stuff that powers the calculator you used to use before you got a smartphone. And you’ll note, that they are just a couple centimeters by a couple centimeters each.

This kit also features new energy harvesting circuitry from E-Peas. E-Peas’ AEM10941 chip is capable of extracting DC power from up to seven solar panels at a time and delivering it to a storage element like the kit’s 60 milliamp hour rechargeable LiPo batter. The AEM10941 features an ultra-low-power cold start of 3 µW at 380 mV to ensure as little energy is wasted as possible, and integrates multiple low dropout regulators. The ultra-low-power boost converter within comes with the maximum power point tracking – MPPT – ratio configured to 80 percent, and measures Voc every 5 seconds.

All in all, this is another awesome way to get started with a renewable way of powering IoT sensors, offering high performance at a reasonable cost. If you’re interested in one of your own, you can order it online from https://www.powerfilmsolar.com/markets/the-indoor-outdoor-e-peas-solar-development-kit for just $59.

Or, as always, you can register for this week’s raffle, and perhaps you’ll win this one for free. And yes, we deliver.

ENTER RAFFLE HERE:

Comment at will, and tune in next week for another edition of Dev Kit Weekly.