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DiscoverCircuits.com -- Hobby Corner
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Tuesday, June 01, 2021 03:06 PM
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Cheap Light Power Meter Circuit
designed
by David Johnson, P.E. 10/18/2006 |
| Some time ago I was
experimenting with the use of some low leakage photovoltaic solar cells, to harvest
some energy from the diffuse lighting inside a room. The plan was to use a
small array of solar cells (the type often used on solar powered calculators) to
keep a super capacitor charged, drawing power from the light within an inside room. |
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Our human eyes are a poor gage of the intensity of the
light within a room, so a more accurate instrument was needed to determine how much
power was available. I blew the dust off an old 1-milliamp meter and attached
a one centimeter square PIN photodiode to it. This allowed me to quickly
measure how much current a solar cell array could generate anywhere there was light.
I was surprised by just how much useful power there was, especially when a room was
brightly illuminated by sunlight reflecting off walls and ceilings. Often, the
current exceeded 200 microamps per square centimeter. Of course in direct sunlight,
the current exceeded 8 milliamps for a 1cm x 1cm solar cell.
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eMail David A.
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