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Powering the Adventurous Geek?
Xochi77 asks: "As a Geek and a Backpacker, my laptop travels where ever I go, but now that I'm planning a trip through remote regions of South America and Africa, I'm starting to wonder where I'm going to get my power from. How has the Slashdot community dealt with powering high-tech gear in third world countries? I'm especially interested in alternative power sources, like solar cells and wind-up generators etc, but they will have to fit in my backpack!"
leave the laptop at home.
wtf are you going to do with a laptop in the middle of a jungle?
if you want to keep a journal, go buy a notepad for $0.69 at Wal-Mart or Staples.
if you need a map, they sell them for a couple of bucks.
dragging a laptop through a primitive country without a real need is just plain dumb. you will either get robbed, drop the laptop, burn the thing out in the tropical climate, or just get shot for being an obnoxious tourist.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
First, you buy one or more car battery solar cell trickle chargers. These things are expensive, and don't charge very fast, but they do work. Next you buy a gel cell (sealed lead acid battery, or SLA) at 12v, perhaps 2 or so AH. Have the solar cell on the outside of your backpack and let it charge the SLA up while hiking. No extra circuitry required, just connect the red to the red, black to the black. The Radio shack $30 solar cells ought to give you about 1 amp hour worth of charge in the SLA every eight hours of bright sun.
Hook the laptop to the battery through a car adaptor (specific to your laptop) and use the laptop for ~15minutes.
Rinse, repeat.
If you want to use it more than 15 minutes every eight hours, buy a more expensive solar cell, or more of them, but the weight/time you get might not be attractive enough to work with.
Were I you, I'd look into getting a very power conservative laptop, palmtop, or even PDA and use it instead. A PDA with a folding keyboard can do pretty much anything you'd want to do with your laptop out in the middle of nowhere, and consumes significantly less energy.
-Adam
--we run on solar here, primarily from fixed rigid normal solar panels. I DO own two lightweight flexible portable panels that work great, they are my emergency bugout backpack panels. The company that makes them is Unisolar. Like almost all PV panels they dump whatever voltage they can get within two extremes of zero and around 20 volts, so for exact charging you would also need a "charge controller". The ones we use come from trace engineering, I have c-12's and c-40's, you could easily get by with their smallest cheapest offering, whatever that is "currently" pun intended. Now note, a carry around with you sized panel is NOT going to keep your laptop running like all day long,, just not happening, but to keep the batts topped off for a quick session then back to charging it's OK. The unisolar panels have grommets on the sides, easy enough to figure out some way to clip them on your back or even across your chest somehow depending on where the sun is as you are hiking.
I primarily have mine to recharge nicad radio and flashlight batts as I wouldn't plan on really humping a laptop in any emergency, but electric is electric, they'll charge batteries if you adjust the voltage output accordingly, ie, adjust charge controller to approximately 14 volts to charge a 12 volt batt, etc. Right now I use them to trickle charge/top off various equipment batteris we have occassionally
My vendor is Four-Winds-Energy
http://www.four-winds-energy.com
The owner Roy is a personal meatworld friend of mine, he has a form on his mainpage you can request any info you might want. He carries these flexible panels, three sizes. Good luck on your trip!
If you want to see some pics of the main solar rig bragger here, goto this other link
http://www.four-winds-energy.com/about.html
scroll down to middle of page see a few pics of "mountaintop in georgia". Nifty stuff!
Have you considered a bean-diet and harvesting wind-energy? But seriously, googling for "solar laptop" gives you links to people who did just what you're trying to do and links to shops which sell the hardware.
Depends on what you are trying to do. If you are taking notes, then I'd get used palm pilot that runs on AAAs (IIIx for example) and a folding keyboard. Unless you are writing all the time, a pair of AAAs should last you about two weeks. Then carry as many spare batteries as your limit of pain allows. For data collection or note taking, this outfit is cheap, light and reasonably rugged.
I've been equipping people for field data collection for a number of years now, and I've been using PalmOS because of battery life considerations, as well as low cost. PocketPC machines are more ambitious, and it shows in their battery life; generally, I have not seen any field worthy pocketPC except for trimble's unit, which has good battery life, integrated DGPS, is built like a brick, weighs like a brick, and costs like a brick (if the brick is made of precious metal).
If you are not going to be away from civilization for more than a week at a time, you could get a new palm, such as the m500. Get a new one so the battery is fresh, and you probably won't have to charge it. Also get the backup card so you can backup your data in case you are gone so long you hard reset. Get a vehicle charger and bum a charge off a friendly native once in a while. Or you could rig a solar charger to a small storage battery and juice up your PDA every few days. The advantage is that you don't have to deliver as much energy as with a laptop, so the battery can be smaller and lighter, and charge times for the storage battery less.
The same strategy could be used for a PocketPC PDA, but you'd have to juice up a lot more frequently. PocketPCs are just a bit bulkier and heavier though.
Another PDA solution would be a used Newton. Again, these are a bit bulky and heavy, but they are good for several weeks solid on 4AAs, and provide a flash card backup option. They're also quite rugged, discounting the possibilty of the glass being smashed, which is the achilles heel of any PDA. I heard about a mining company engineer who lost one in a river, fished it out a week later, and simply opened all the compartments and let it dry by the fire for a day. Popped in fresh batteries and it started right up.
Speaking of which, there are armored, waterproof, floating cases available for the most popular PDA models including palms.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I would tell you to talk to Court Demas since he did what you'd like to do, but he was tragically
robbed and murdered while traveling in remote parts of Peru a few months ago. Be careful while travling in remote parts of the world, especially while carrying expensive toys.
If you are in a city, you probably won't have too much problems, but some things to be careful about: 1) Leave you case tightly zipped when not in use. I once lost a shortwave radio due to an ant colony deciding to use it. 2) Humidity. Air conditioning removes humidity as well as lowers the temperature, so we Americans have lost sight of what humidity can do to things. The Ashanti region in Ghana during the rainy season and anyway on the Fiji islands at any time are humid. I mean really, really mold growing on everything, laminations peeling away before your eyes, humid. 3) Dust. There is a Harmattan season anywhere south of the Sahara (which is big, roughly the size of the continental US). This means a whole lot of dust. I was once a passenger in a bush taxi on a dirt road when the windshield shattered. The driver pulled over, kicked out the windshield and we proceded to drive a couple hundred miles in the dust. You can not imagine what we looked like at the end of the trip. More importantly, every tiny gap in my luggage had served as gate house for the red laderite clay dust. Everything in my zipped bag had to be washed. 4) Weird Bugs. I was visiting someone in a very small village in the Fiji Islands. She lived in a traditional thatched house (she wasn't local. The locals used galvanized steel roofing...) I opened up a book on her shelf. It had different colored print, or rather it used to have. Some mites had eaten all the letters out of the book, except for one color (blue?) It was the neatest thing...