I made a similar mod a few years ago. However my solar light was a hanging paper ball, so I put a hanging 500F supercap hanging inside the ball. I also replaced the LED with a wide angle strawhat, but it was quite pointless. Inside there was a standard 4 pin chip to control the process. Like yours, the supercap never reaches 2V which means that you can utilize less than the half of its energy capacity. On the other hand the 4 pin chip does not allow voltage to drop below 0.9V because it thinks it is a NiMH battery, and has to protect it, or it just can't boost the voltage up. This means you can't use that energy of the supercap either. But overall if the supercap is charged well it works ~4h :)
Julian, I've watched many of your videos and I think the reason you have so much trouble soldering is that you run your iron too cool. I've been soldering for decades and I've never used lead solder below 700F (370C). Here are the temperatures I use: 700F (370C) Surface Mount 750F (400C) Through hole 800F (425C) Large wires 850F (450C) Heavily heatsinked I'll admit that I solder at slightly higher temperatures than most, but I prefer to move more quickly at a higher temperature and I don't have problems with damaging components. I think it's more likely to damage them at a low temperature where you have to hold the iron on the component for several seconds. If you like to move more slowly than me you might consider dropping my temperatures by 25-50F.
Never have checked to see if the temp gauge on my iron is close to right but if I set my iron over 360c it burns the tips so baddly the finish flakes off and they are never the same. The little digital hand held unit I have seems to be best right at or just below 300c for most projects, I go to 350c when I need more heat or a bit higher for chase work. Times have happened where I hold the iron a bit wrong and hit the temp up button and get over 400c but as I say my tips quickly go purple then black and the finish floats to the top of the solder and the tip is pretty much dead. Of course tips are damn cheep so it is no great loss, just a pain to have to wait for them to arrive from China.
Dab some flux with your flux pen on the corroded bits. It helps a lot. I also dabbed a load of conformal coating on our garden lights. A dab of petrolium jelly on the contacts of the battery help stop corrosion.
Nice work Julian, Would like to see a version 2, along the lines of Jerry Ericsson's comment below along with real time verse calculated.... This is right up your ally and at the beginning of the summer, go on Julian, be a bad boy and fire our imaginations. Many thanks for sharing, you make it fun
We know that Q=CV and so C * ΔV = Q = I * t and rearranging for t gives t = C*ΔV/I if the voltage range was 1.8 down to 1.1 volts and LED current was 5mA, then I make the duration: t = 0.7 *10/0.005 = 1400 secs or 23mins
Ah yes another reason why super capacitors see completely pointless. No use I've seen has even approached a battery. I can't see why people even mention them when no viable use has ever been referenced. Is it really just snake oil or has anyone got an application that lasts more than a few minutes where a battery would last hours? Please I would really like to find out why anyone thinks these are useful.
@Juncus Bufonius Look up Robert Murray Smith. He has hundreds of videos showing the process of building and discussing different forms of supercapacitors which can be made starting out with common household ingredients. His youtube channel is an entire course for the technology, and he's achieved energy densities rivaling lithium ion with all the benefits of a supercapacitor (like 100C charging for example). Carbon batteries are supercapacitors and any organic material that can be turned into a carbon can be used to make supercapacitors. On the other hand, all lithium based batteries require Cobalt in their electrode material, which is mined in the Congo, often employing children to do the harder to reach mining. So IMO any lithium battery is a dirty battery since the Congo has over a third of the global Cobalt market export.
Juncus Bufonius I remember watching a video of a guy who was tired of the backup battery in his alarm clock running out (9V... how often does the power go out long enough for that to happen?) so he replaced it with a supercap. But apparently he had some success. If only I could find that video again.
Now we just need someone to prank him by sneaking in his garden at night and swap out the super capacitor with one that has had a nicad put inside it's case! He would be telling everyone about how great that conversion turned out to be.hahaha
Go ahead, toss all that circuitry, build a juel thief circuit to connect the solar to the super cap, and another from the super cap to the LED, things should work much better. Strange the things the human mind can come up when given a pile of electronic parts and lots of time to play around with them. The true genius is in how you hook thing up to make different and better devices, or perhaps just different and innovative devices. Thank you so much for the video's I watch every day for new ones to keep my old brain firing on all 8 cylinders.
The garden light circuit is a joule thief circuit. The battery is too low a voltage to light a white led so the IC and inductor boost the voltage to the LED. The circuit is very simple and very efficient.
Good mornafterevening, Julian! A heat gun to that supercapacitor is not a good idea. They really don't like those temperatures. One Poundland-style garden light rejuvenated. Thanks.
Flux dissolves the oxidized layer on metal that has been well sitting in the air for a bit that is a poor thermal conductor a little squirted or q-tip you have sitting in your flux to apply to what you are soldering will remove that issue with the solder not melting well or adhering to the intended places. you could also probably just dip the end of your solder wire in your bottle of decent flux and if it is flux cored solder it should melt and feed flux onto what you are working on and mix quickly. Sometime the cheaper solder or lead free stuff has poor quality flux core or very little of it and the core isn't always exposed at the previously melted off end of your spool of solder giving you no flux to bubble up and remove all that oxidation..
where did you buy those LEDs? I have bunch of LED wires corroted and need to replace LED only. OR do you know wher ecan I buy this ready made circuit board I can fit in existing light holder?
love your videos.So what type solder and flux is most commonly used in this type electronics? ive noticed the wire ,is it aluminium or stainless or copper.it is hard to use lead when re-attaching.I see you prefer lead solder as i do.So what type wire is that and does that inductor raise the voltage.im tryin to get a 5 volt or its actually an 8mm led but it has only 1.2 volt battery.so how are they getting a raised voltage even with 5mm led.?Sincerely thank you .Keep it up.
The Tips of the TS100 are constructed, that the heat is only at the very end of the tip. If you heat the iron up to 350°C the end which plugs in the iron stays at about 30-40°C. That means you can change the tip even when its still hot.
If the function of the garden lights is to provide illumination for as long as possible off the provided circuit surely this is a 'Wasted Exercise in reducing efficacy'. Why would you even bother? or am i missing some more subtle, deeper, hidden purpose?
Liked the video, hoped the cap would over drive the LED circuitry and blow it up :) Anyway.. Now we have UK sun for a few weeks, are you progressing your new solar charge controller project?
You should clean the solar panel & since the capacitor is shorter than the battery you should find something that will hold the capacitor in the space tightly. By doing both of these extra steps your lights will stay lit much longer & brightly. If the lower lamp part is plastic use an appropriate cleaner; if they are glass you can use that headlight defogging cleanser.
Over the years I have, for some odd reason purchased lots of these garden lights. I have no idea why I do this because you will be very lucky to get one year out of them. Basically, EVERYTHING fails , even the plastic case falls apart due UV. Still they do look good for a few months. Soon be time to get some more!!
I hear you but it's kind of part of the fun to see how they accept harsh weather conditions, though they never seem to be very water proof. Guess can't expect too much for the cost.
@Adam Pierce many different types of plastic :-) and it may be that if you bury your garden light it would last for many years , except the battery , hehe :-)
I bought my wife some chinese lanterns to hang in the oak trees in our back yard. They were so dim I swapped duracell aa’s into them...three months later they still charge and light up at night, no leaky batteries.
I made one with two 400F super caps. It can last throughout the night if it is a really sunny day, but my solar panel is a fair bit bigger than that one. It's too bad there isn't an IC out there that is made for supercaps yet. The one I have stops at .9V to protect a NiMH battery. Only gets a range of about .9-2.5v that way.
Probably around 10 to 100 minutes, depending upon LED current. A couple of hours at 1 mA for a dim LED. There must be room inside that case for a lot more than 10 Farads of storage, but a NiMH battery would be cheaper and more capable. The first thing to do with most of those lights is to dump the supplied battery and to put a known good one into the holder. I've seen new '600mAh' cells in those lamps with true capacities of less than 150 mAh. As a consequence, they spend much of their time discharged and die quite quickly. Next job is to waterproof the solar panel and other components adequately. Rainwater can destroy most of those lamps within a year.
The only things to fail are the switch and battery usually, the battery from age, the switch from rust, typically rust will build up on the component legs over time. How to make a cool LED solar garden light that lasts nearly forever with only battery replacements needed? Simple, don't use the actual steak with it. get a large glass var, and cut a square hold in the lid, now use silicone to glue the solar light inside. The biggest advantage of this is that it stops all moisture, you can pull it out a year later and there will be no rusting on the components, because water couldn't physically get in there. The glass also is good, it doesn't discolour with the sunlight. That's literally all you have to do, then when it stops working, unscrew the lid, and replace the battery. Another cool thing is to do what bigclive did, remove the LED and soldier in a connector thing in it's place, this enables you to easily switch in and out new LED's without having to solder them in, so you can routinely change the colours if you want by just pushing them into the connector thing. Personally I agree with clive that a rich blue is probably the easiest to get colour that looks nice of a night time. I only like purple more, but getting a powerful purple at that voltage is not cheap or easy, so blue is the way to go. BTW I am planning on doing this, it's actually possible to make a much higher powered unit with brighter light output, by essentially using the same IC and circuit board etc. You will still use the glass bottle, but instead you will buy a small solar panel, check the voltage of the one already in your garden light, it's likely around 3v, and only puts out like 20mA. What you can buy off ebay is a 3v panel that puts out 150mA, much better, it's around 6cmx5.5cm in size, it's not too large that you can't glue it into a square hole cut into the jar lid. Now you simply connect this to the solar panel positive and negative of the circuit board. You will have to replace the inductor however, a lower microhenry inductor will allow more mA on the output of a night time, so you will usually need to replace the inductor on the circuit board with something more like a 33 microhenry inductor, which will allow around 30mA of output. You will also put in a higher powered LED, able to take advantage of this. Also the battery should remain AA, but you should replace the typical 200mAh battery with something more like a 600mAh battery. This is a good project, I might do it. Make a long lasting and powerful solar garden light. Because to be honest, the typical solar garden light is very weak, and you have to pay more like 10 dollars to get one that is even half powerful.
Before you completely replace a wire that isn’t taking solder very well, try brushing on some strong vinegar, some dissolved citric acid crystals (it’s in the aisle with the canning supplies), lime-a-way, CLR, swimming pool acid (AKA muriatic, or hydrochloric acid) really anything acid based, rinse that off with distilled or at least purified water, then brush on some ammonia or ammonia-based cleaner which will remove any remaining grime as well as neutralize any remaining acidic anything- basically restore a completely neutral Ph to everything. I will then pull the stripped wire AND the length of solder I’m about to use through a folded piece of 320-400 grit sandpaper, and give both a final purge with a tissue soaked with alcohol. By now, the copper strands should be super light in color, and super shiny, and the length of solder wire should look like polished sterling silver. As to the solder tip itself, after trying all kinds of things, the current front-runner is a very specific type of kitchen scrubbie. DO NOT USE ANYTHING RESEMBLING STEEL WOOL! I hate that stuff… its not good for anything except ruining a surface while leaving behind whatever you were trying to remove. This includes “brillo” pads or anything like it. What I’m talking about is a very specific type of scrubbie made out of tight coils of very narrow and very thin strips of stainless steel or copper… Instead of gouging, like steel wool,they use more like a “shaving” action; with your solder tip hot, pull it through on of these a few times, and it will squeegee off all the contaminants and kind of refresh whatever tinning method you used on your soldering tip. Final step: apply a fresh coating of clean flux paste to the stripped wire, any terminal, plate, or surface you expect to accept solder. Dip both the solder tip and the solder wire itself into the flux paste, and try to get a little droplet of melted solder to ride the end of the solder tip. As soon as that droplet comes in contact with a clean, but flux-coated twisted bundle of copper strands, it should flow on and just disappear as it “wicks” into the bundle. Once the stripped end is in this condition, it should melt and bond instantly once it is heated to melting point while it is being held in contact with whatever it is supposed to bond with. Once I started using this method of making sure that everything involved is meticulously cleaned and thoroughly doped with flux, (including the solder wire itself), the whole process was a totally frustrating hit-and-miss proposition that I would just come to dread. One more thing I was doing wrong was not paying attention to the tinning on my soldering tip. I finally found this product advertised as a “tinning paste”. I think it is a combination of rather high temperature solder and some kind of adhesive because once its on there, it doesn’t seem to just come right off as soon as its melted again. It comes in a little round metal container, and I highly recommend it. Good luck! Hope this helps!
@@ronjones4069 Nope. I did it to with my test solar light and I have different results. I modifyed the board to weaked a little the LED (weaker light, but much longer work time), added better cables and I put resin on board to prevent it from water. Now they shine even if other lamps dont want to work (because of the rain), and if weather is good, works up to 2h I think. I never was patient enought to measure it xD Already I got few deads lights (battery died) but my modded lights still works fine. I used 50F and 100F ultra capasitors. Putting all together was a little pain in ass but result is satisfying. One tip is to check the solar panel. Solar cells in resin panel can crack and lost their power (but voltage is still ok) and those glass cells can coroded if worker did not put enough hot glue under solar panel.
I would think restoring optical clarity to the cover of the solar panel would be absolutely critical… it looks like it needs every photon of sunlight it can possibly get. The “Tech ingredients” guy showed how much difference it can make to simply place the solar panel down into a concentrator sort of reverse lens that the sides are mirrored and tilted in such a way that the sunlight bounces off of these surfaces and on to the solar panel. Casts a bigger net, so to speak..
I am curious. Because there isn't a battery management system in the solar light, with the open circuit voltage of the panel being about 3volt (I think) the super cap would be charged to the full 2.7 volts. Which when the solar lights LED turns on, would the higher voltage of the super cap be too much for the circuit powering the LED? As it's expecting 1.2volt? I love that your experimenting with these again, I started fiddling with them yesterday. Fun little things, and cheap!
Ah, ya know what, I watched the rest of the video and you answered my question. Nice! I usually watch the whole video before commenting. Should have waited! Thanks for the project idea! Any idea if this will work with the amorphous style solar lights? Those are just 1USD a piece here, could be fun to tinker with.
Should work with any solar light that has just one AA nicd/nimh battery, as they would need the joule thief or step up circuitry to get the roughly 3v needed to light the white leds.
I would have coated the board with paint or hot glue to keep the water/oxidization to a minimum. It sucks to have to take it apart every year to clean it up and rework the board. Especially here in the rainy Pacific NW.
So the corrosion may have been caused by some moisture getting in there? I suspect, since we can have electrical components inside a house like a graphics card and computer motherboard for decades and they still don't have corrosion. This is the cause of the corrosion also on the other parts. It maybe wasn't water literally dripping in, but maybe it was like mist in the morning and anything outside that has any holes in it will allow some mist to go inside it. Either way, they rarely care about the long life of the solar light. There are much more expensive ones that use glass and rubber seals that probably would last a very long time and not allow moisture in. Here in Australia the most cheap solar garden light is 1 dollar, the expensive ones are around 8 or 10 dollars each. Because here in Australia even the black plastic part on cheaper ones will just crack and fall apart after about 18 months in the sun. I like the ones with a metal top which looks like copper (but it actually some other type of steel with colour), and then of course the glass piece for the light (since plastic ones go cloudy and even yellow in time). All of my cheap solar garden lights literally fail within 2 years, but my expensive one has lasted around 6 years and still counting and all I had to do was replace it's battery and it had no corrosion in there either.
that scap can allow you to charge a cell phone with a usb step up and a hi quality small set up like that. it would only work under the sun but still,it's all you need really. the phone become your night light. i made advancements in caps by using a plus to plus connection but du to cap size and capacitance its take 1 inch more space than the battery size does. please try my set up and try to figure out how efficient it really is so far i get up to 100% when the charges and discharges are done in the right synchronicity.. i get to transfer the energy rather than wasting all of it.
in theory could you have used an old cell phone battery? I'm guessing the battery would be somewhat protected from overcharging only from limitations of what the circuit thought it was going to charge, right? or would that be pointless and dangerous? (I'm just curious cuz I like to tinker but I'm not circuit handy)
Every time I see you change the tip on this soldering iron, I grow sad because the designer missed the mark. They really should have used a ball bearing and spring for a detent instead of a set screw. Sad.
The 5252f is such a hackable chip. It _can_ be used to drive a flyback transformer and generate high voltage. Its solar in pin for charging can _sort of_ be used as a "chip enable"/gate pin and vary the output level. Created a really shit sound generator out of this thing. Who knows, it might be possible to create a radio transmitter out of this thing.
I glued three little Dollar Tree solar lights on the spinning blades of the ornamental windmill in the back yard and one to the tail fin. I replaced the couldn't make it through the night worn out AAA batteries with AA batteries. Easy to do, you cut off the AAA plastic and the AA will fit just right into the case and you can use the AAA contacts and spring. Thus far they are still working. I've got lots of things I ought to be fixing but there is something about looking out the kitchen sink window and watching those spinning lights that bumped the windmill to the top of the list. Next project is to make a solar charger for the AA batteries in the clocks hanging on the wall, I'll replace the LED with a diode. Should be enough light in the room to keep it working forever ........ or at least half of forever.
I've been wanting to do this with my outdoor battery-operated decorations. I want all my lit decorations to be powered by the sun and automatically turn on at night. Tell me how you go about this please or link me.
@UCmHvGf00GDuPYG9DZqQKd9A - Thanks for the video. Good electronics, could do with some better optics by polishing up the solar panel and the outer shell of the lamp. So I have to ask what is the point of having a lamp that only runs for a matter of minutes? Is it just a academic exercise or do you have a special purpose for it?
Would it be useful to make a video explaining rather simply how to wrap one's head around the maths needed to calculate the running time of that LED? I would find it interesting. I mean.. I can imagine how it's written, that 1 farad delivering 1 amp for 1 second will lose 1 volt, but how to come to terms with a physical thing like that LED and circuit drawing whatever it does. It seems my brain doesn't work very well for this! Thanks for the video, enjoy the sun!
You can polish the surface of the solar cell clear again with toothpaste or jewelers rouge and a felt pad on a dremel in a minute or two also. Same for the light cover. Get crazy with the hot glue gun to water proof the seals of the enclosure also. :P
Chinese made. They use copper plated steel stranded wire. They do not take to flexing too well. After replacing with true copper wire add a dab of hot melt glue to add strain relief to them. If you can find silicone conformal coating spray, give them a few layers of coating. The corrosion will not return.
Supercaps use a different internal construction which allows the plates to be separated by self-forming insulating layers at nano-scale. This results in a massively increased capacitance - easily over a farad, orders of magnitude higher than any other type of capacitor. The down-side is that they have a very low maximum voltage, typically around 2.5V. The highest I've seen is 5V, and I suspect that was two matched capacitors in one package.
They are expensive and seemingly need to have huge numbers to make them useful and long time or high current to charge them for any heavy use. So appear to be the perfect way to part people from money. Li-po actually works now. They are also much bigger than Li-po at the same mAh I believe.
They have a few advantages over chemical batteries. They can achieve higher efficiency with proper management. They have enormous power density - if you think shorting a lipo can give you a lot of current, it's got nothing on a supercap. They barely age at all - ten year life without loss of capacity, even if you charge and discharge them a thousand times a day.
Hi Julian, interesting idea but anyway - there is another volune to place capacitor in and use another type of solar panel to charge it up, or am I wrong? And what about waterproofing it with some nail polish or resin? It is so wasteful to make these lights nearly one-year only - I mean that is producer fault... Cheers...
You need a bigger capacitor, if that one is 10F then if they made one to fill the whole battery area then it may be able to reach 100F. But even 100F will still reach it's 1.5v from this system faster than the batter would and it won't actually be holding it's 100F either, maybe only around half of that. So 55 or 50F and it will be around 0.05 watt hours. I suspect it would only last around 3 hours. And with your smaller model here with the tiny cap I think only about 10-15 minutes you should expect it to run for. Because also the capacitor does constantly drop when being discharged. A battery is always superior for these things. It will be cool when they do make high capacity capacitors in the future though. Because when they do this it would be a good fit for their usage as things like self discharge wouldn't matter as it would turn on and start going as soon as the sun goes down anyway and doesn't have to sit around holding it's charge. They would have to make a new circuit that would be able to get the most power out of the capacitor even when it hits voltages well under 1V also for it to be efficient. Imagine a capacitor the size of that battery compartment that is 1000F. Caps will never replace batteries entirely of course, but I think in the future they will replace batteries in certain things which commonly go through charge and discharge very commonly like solar lights, battery toothbrush (which sits in it's dock), etc
Will not last long because most of boost converter ICs stop working around 0.9V-1.2V So half of the supercap is wasted. If resistance of diode is know you will get time about 0.5RC
You were lucky with resoldering the back of the PV Cells. i have some that WILL NOT take lead solder at all !. polish the PV cell with Silvo or toothpaste.
I have taken apart a couple of garden lights and found the red positive wire to the PV cell comes off rather easily ( weak solder connection ? ) Any suggestions on making a successful solder connection to a cell ? JwgK
I made a similar mod a few years ago. However my solar light was a hanging paper ball, so I put a hanging 500F supercap hanging inside the ball. I also replaced the LED with a wide angle strawhat, but it was quite pointless. Inside there was a standard 4 pin chip to control the process. Like yours, the supercap never reaches 2V which means that you can utilize less than the half of its energy capacity. On the other hand the 4 pin chip does not allow voltage to drop below 0.9V because it thinks it is a NiMH battery, and has to protect it, or it just can't boost the voltage up. This means you can't use that energy of the supercap either. But overall if the supercap is charged well it works ~4h :)
Greybeard tip: use a round toothpick to poke through holes on pcbs once you melted the solder you can't sucker away
Julian, I've watched many of your videos and I think the reason you have so much trouble soldering is that you run your iron too cool. I've been soldering for decades and I've never used lead solder below 700F (370C). Here are the temperatures I use:
700F (370C) Surface Mount
750F (400C) Through hole
800F (425C) Large wires
850F (450C) Heavily heatsinked
I'll admit that I solder at slightly higher temperatures than most, but I prefer to move more quickly at a higher temperature and I don't have problems with damaging components. I think it's more likely to damage them at a low temperature where you have to hold the iron on the component for several seconds.
If you like to move more slowly than me you might consider dropping my temperatures by 25-50F.
Never have checked to see if the temp gauge on my iron is close to right but if I set my iron over 360c it burns the tips so baddly the finish flakes off and they are never the same. The little digital hand held unit I have seems to be best right at or just below 300c for most projects, I go to 350c when I need more heat or a bit higher for chase work. Times have happened where I hold the iron a bit wrong and hit the temp up button and get over 400c but as I say my tips quickly go purple then black and the finish floats to the top of the solder and the tip is pretty much dead. Of course tips are damn cheep so it is no great loss, just a pain to have to wait for them to arrive from China.
Dab some flux with your flux pen on the corroded bits. It helps a lot. I also dabbed a load of conformal coating on our garden lights. A dab of petrolium jelly on the contacts of the battery help stop corrosion.
Flux makes everything better.
wobbly sauce
Especially capacitors.
Just like bacon!
dabdabdab
Flux is your friend Julian, flux is your friend.
Nice work Julian, Would like to see a version 2, along the lines of
Jerry Ericsson's comment below along with real time verse calculated....
This is right up your ally and at the beginning of the summer, go on Julian, be a bad boy and fire our imaginations.
Many thanks for sharing, you make it fun
I almost feel leaving the "heatproof tubing" off the led legs might help longevity, by not holding moisture on/near the legs.
We know that Q=CV and so C * ΔV = Q = I * t and rearranging for t gives t = C*ΔV/I
if the voltage range was 1.8 down to 1.1 volts and LED current was 5mA, then I make the duration:
t = 0.7 *10/0.005 = 1400 secs or 23mins
Hey love your videos man!
That's not very long. Do they make bigger super caps in an AA format?
Ah yes another reason why super capacitors see completely pointless. No use I've seen has even approached a battery. I can't see why people even mention them when no viable use has ever been referenced. Is it really just snake oil or has anyone got an application that lasts more than a few minutes where a battery would last hours? Please I would really like to find out why anyone thinks these are useful.
@Juncus Bufonius Look up Robert Murray Smith. He has hundreds of videos showing the process of building and discussing different forms of supercapacitors which can be made starting out with common household ingredients. His youtube channel is an entire course for the technology, and he's achieved energy densities rivaling lithium ion with all the benefits of a supercapacitor (like 100C charging for example). Carbon batteries are supercapacitors and any organic material that can be turned into a carbon can be used to make supercapacitors. On the other hand, all lithium based batteries require Cobalt in their electrode material, which is mined in the Congo, often employing children to do the harder to reach mining. So IMO any lithium battery is a dirty battery since the Congo has over a third of the global Cobalt market export.
Juncus Bufonius
I remember watching a video of a guy who was tired of the backup battery in his alarm clock running out (9V... how often does the power go out long enough for that to happen?) so he replaced it with a supercap.
But apparently he had some success. If only I could find that video again.
I'm learning how to solder, so your video was very helpful. I had many of the same problems repairing a thermostat, but I didn't know why.
Now we just need someone to prank him by sneaking in his garden at night and swap out the super capacitor with one that has had a nicad put inside it's case! He would be telling everyone about how great that conversion turned out to be.hahaha
Shut up
Go ahead, toss all that circuitry, build a juel thief circuit to connect the solar to the super cap, and another from the super cap to the LED, things should work much better. Strange the things the human mind can come up when given a pile of electronic parts and lots of time to play around with them. The true genius is in how you hook thing up to make different and better devices, or perhaps just different and innovative devices. Thank you so much for the video's I watch every day for new ones to keep my old brain firing on all 8 cylinders.
Thanks Jerry, I always appreciate your comments :)
Jerry Ericsson
I did it with 2xAAA battery and 5v solar
The garden light circuit is a joule thief circuit. The battery is too low a voltage to light a white led so the IC and inductor boost the voltage to the LED. The circuit is very simple and very efficient.
Is there some reason that you don’t use flux? I think that it would make soldering the oxidized solder blobs much easier.
I always polish the surface of the solar panel with Brasso, it lets more sunlight through. The poor thing you had has cataracts.
Julian, what kind of soldering iron is that ? I want one !!
Good mornafterevening, Julian! A heat gun to that supercapacitor is not a good idea. They really don't like those temperatures. One Poundland-style garden light rejuvenated. Thanks.
Flux dissolves the oxidized layer on metal that has been well sitting in the air for a bit that is a poor thermal conductor a little squirted or q-tip you have sitting in your flux to apply to what you are soldering will remove that issue with the solder not melting well or adhering to the intended places. you could also probably just dip the end of your solder wire in your bottle of decent flux and if it is flux cored solder it should melt and feed flux onto what you are working on and mix quickly. Sometime the cheaper solder or lead free stuff has poor quality flux core or very little of it and the core isn't always exposed at the previously melted off end of your spool of solder giving you no flux to bubble up and remove all that oxidation..
where did you buy those LEDs? I have bunch of LED wires corroted and need to replace LED only. OR do you know wher ecan I buy this ready made circuit board I can fit in existing light holder?
Aren't stranded wires supposed to be used for flexibility over solid?
i have a heap of these lights could i use two of the solar cells in series to get closer to full charge
By the rusty brown fogging in the dome it looks like it's filling up with water. Bad waterproofing kills these things often.
Unrelated to this video but, Julian have you ever done a review/test of the BK300 PIC16F877a Development board?
how many panels will it take to charge a single 18650 batt using a TP-4056 module?
awesome man thank you for sharing ...
I usually tell my friends, if Julian Ilett can solder, anyone can solder! But seriously replace that iron, any cheap iron is better.
ingenious use of that lump of blu tack
love your videos.So what type solder and flux is most commonly used in this type electronics? ive noticed the wire ,is it aluminium or stainless or copper.it is hard to use lead when re-attaching.I see you prefer lead solder as i do.So what type wire is that and does that inductor raise the voltage.im tryin to get a 5 volt or its actually an 8mm led but it has only 1.2 volt battery.so how are they getting a raised voltage even with 5mm led.?Sincerely thank you .Keep it up.
The Tips of the TS100 are constructed, that the heat is only at the very end of the tip. If you heat the iron up to 350°C the end which plugs in the iron stays at about 30-40°C. That means you can change the tip even when its still hot.
Where do you get this soldering iron stand? Please provide a link or something 🙏
If the function of the garden lights is to provide illumination for as long as possible off the provided circuit surely this is a 'Wasted Exercise in reducing efficacy'. Why would you even bother? or am i missing some more subtle, deeper, hidden purpose?
Liked the video, hoped the cap would over drive the LED circuitry and blow it up :) Anyway.. Now we have UK sun for a few weeks, are you progressing your new solar charge controller project?
You should clean the solar panel & since the capacitor is shorter than the battery you should find something that will hold the capacitor in the space tightly. By doing both of these extra steps your lights will stay lit much longer & brightly. If the lower lamp part is plastic use an appropriate cleaner; if they are glass you can use that headlight defogging cleanser.
what part of this makes the capacitor run it for longer?
You need 500 farad for a solar light. Also 10 farad may be little more than 5mah. So you need a 330 to 400uh inductor so it uses less current.
You may try a lto battery for an upgrade. Small Lithium titanate bateries could be as big as a super capacitor but much higher capacity.
Over the years I have, for some odd reason purchased lots of these garden lights. I have no idea why I do this because you will be very lucky to get one year out of them. Basically, EVERYTHING fails , even the plastic case falls apart due UV. Still they do look good for a few months. Soon be time to get some more!!
I hear you but it's kind of part of the fun to see how they accept harsh weather conditions, though they never seem to be very water proof. Guess can't expect too much for the cost.
Wait a moment! I’ve been told that plastic remains in the landfill forever without degrading. Can the information be wrong?
At $2 each why, I can try to fix them and learn something in the process. If I fail to fix it, it will not break my wallet.
@Adam Pierce
many different types of plastic :-)
and it may be that if you bury your garden light it would last for many years , except the battery , hehe :-)
That soldering iron ist just such an unergonomic pos, the way you are forced to hold it makes me cringe every time I see you using it.
Horrible device ... but it has a display in the handle to sell it!
Yeah, it looks a bit dangerous to me! That metal flange just looks like an accident waiting to happen.
You have to wave it like a wand
i fucking love my TS100....you know nothing
i STILL fucking love my TS100....you know nothing EITHER
Hello, I would like to know what the reference number of the LED is, and if you change it to a blue one it will give the same amount of light
I bought my wife some chinese lanterns to hang in the oak trees in our back yard. They were so dim I swapped duracell aa’s into them...three months later they still charge and light up at night, no leaky batteries.
Ouch it burns! Best laugh I'd had all day :)
Which capacitor can be used for 6v 3w solar panel
so by adding more than one cap it would extend run time?
where do you get your blue tac
I made one with two 400F super caps. It can last throughout the night if it is a really sunny day, but my solar panel is a fair bit bigger than that one. It's too bad there isn't an IC out there that is made for supercaps yet. The one I have stops at .9V to protect a NiMH battery. Only gets a range of about .9-2.5v that way.
you should test the runtime!
Probably around 10 to 100 minutes, depending upon LED current. A couple of hours at 1 mA for a dim LED.
There must be room inside that case for a lot more than 10 Farads of storage, but a NiMH battery would be cheaper and more capable. The first thing to do with most of those lights is to dump the supplied battery and to put a known good one into the holder. I've seen new '600mAh' cells in those lamps with true capacities of less than 150 mAh. As a consequence, they spend much of their time discharged and die quite quickly.
Next job is to waterproof the solar panel and other components adequately. Rainwater can destroy most of those lamps within a year.
if the LED was faulty then is the battery still ok?
Why do you just remove the corroded contacts from the battery.
Chances are now that the super condenser is affected.
Julian, no IC in this design? I was expecting to see a YX8018 or something similar inside.
No, all discrete :)
Does this still work, after 2+ years?
i thank you for all you are great shares,big fan here.
Amazing content, deserves more subs, cheers!
Solor panel needs Tcuting nice video what's the run time and what's the price on the caps etc
What Portable Soldering iron Do you use
The only things to fail are the switch and battery usually, the battery from age, the switch from rust, typically rust will build up on the component legs over time. How to make a cool LED solar garden light that lasts nearly forever with only battery replacements needed?
Simple, don't use the actual steak with it. get a large glass var, and cut a square hold in the lid, now use silicone to glue the solar light inside. The biggest advantage of this is that it stops all moisture, you can pull it out a year later and there will be no rusting on the components, because water couldn't physically get in there.
The glass also is good, it doesn't discolour with the sunlight.
That's literally all you have to do, then when it stops working, unscrew the lid, and replace the battery. Another cool thing is to do what bigclive did, remove the LED and soldier in a connector thing in it's place, this enables you to easily switch in and out new LED's without having to solder them in, so you can routinely change the colours if you want by just pushing them into the connector thing. Personally I agree with clive that a rich blue is probably the easiest to get colour that looks nice of a night time. I only like purple more, but getting a powerful purple at that voltage is not cheap or easy, so blue is the way to go.
BTW I am planning on doing this, it's actually possible to make a much higher powered unit with brighter light output, by essentially using the same IC and circuit board etc. You will still use the glass bottle, but instead you will buy a small solar panel, check the voltage of the one already in your garden light, it's likely around 3v, and only puts out like 20mA. What you can buy off ebay is a 3v panel that puts out 150mA, much better, it's around 6cmx5.5cm in size, it's not too large that you can't glue it into a square hole cut into the jar lid. Now you simply connect this to the solar panel positive and negative of the circuit board. You will have to replace the inductor however, a lower microhenry inductor will allow more mA on the output of a night time, so you will usually need to replace the inductor on the circuit board with something more like a 33 microhenry inductor, which will allow around 30mA of output. You will also put in a higher powered LED, able to take advantage of this. Also the battery should remain AA, but you should replace the typical 200mAh battery with something more like a 600mAh battery.
This is a good project, I might do it. Make a long lasting and powerful solar garden light. Because to be honest, the typical solar garden light is very weak, and you have to pay more like 10 dollars to get one that is even half powerful.
Hi, what is the purpose of the inductor in this light? I'm new to learning electronics and always ask lots of questions.
It's used to booster the current to the LED.
scratching covered solder with a screwdriver or something like that works lika a charm too :)
Looks like there could be some of them put inside there to get it to last longer.
Before you completely replace a wire that isn’t taking solder very well, try brushing on some strong vinegar, some dissolved citric acid crystals (it’s in the aisle with the canning supplies), lime-a-way, CLR, swimming pool acid (AKA muriatic, or hydrochloric acid) really anything acid based, rinse that off with distilled or at least purified water, then brush on some ammonia or ammonia-based cleaner which will remove any remaining grime as well as neutralize any remaining acidic anything- basically restore a completely neutral Ph to everything. I will then pull the stripped wire AND the length of solder I’m about to use through a folded piece of 320-400 grit sandpaper, and give both a final purge with a tissue soaked with alcohol. By now, the copper strands should be super light in color, and super shiny, and the length of solder wire should look like polished sterling silver. As to the solder tip itself, after trying all kinds of things, the current front-runner is a very specific type of kitchen scrubbie. DO NOT USE ANYTHING RESEMBLING STEEL WOOL! I hate that stuff… its not good for anything except ruining a surface while leaving behind whatever you were trying to remove. This includes “brillo” pads or anything like it. What I’m talking about is a very specific type of scrubbie made out of tight coils of very narrow and very thin strips of stainless steel or copper… Instead of gouging, like steel wool,they use more like a “shaving” action; with your solder tip hot, pull it through on of these a few times, and it will squeegee off all the contaminants and kind of refresh whatever tinning method you used on your soldering tip. Final step: apply a fresh coating of clean flux paste to the stripped wire, any terminal, plate, or surface you expect to accept solder. Dip both the solder tip and the solder wire itself into the flux paste, and try to get a little droplet of melted solder to ride the end of the solder tip. As soon as that droplet comes in contact with a clean, but flux-coated twisted bundle of copper strands, it should flow on and just disappear as it “wicks” into the bundle. Once the stripped end is in this condition, it should melt and bond instantly once it is heated to melting point while it is being held in contact with whatever it is supposed to bond with. Once I started using this method of making sure that everything involved is meticulously cleaned and thoroughly doped with flux, (including the solder wire itself), the whole process was a totally frustrating hit-and-miss proposition that I would just come to dread. One more thing I was doing wrong was not paying attention to the tinning on my soldering tip. I finally found this product advertised as a “tinning paste”. I think it is a combination of rather high temperature solder and some kind of adhesive because once its on there, it doesn’t seem to just come right off as soon as its melted again. It comes in a little round metal container, and I highly recommend it. Good luck! Hope this helps!
I use vinegar for nearly all corrosion removal.
pro tip, wrap the wire around the leads of the capacitor to make a better joint in the future :-)
Flow a bit of fresh solder to the old, it'll then flow.
What's your soldering iron?
how long did it run for?
Much less than a battery for the same cost I suspect.
See G6EJD reply above. It would last only a few minutes.
yep pretty pointless
@@ronjones4069 Nope. I did it to with my test solar light and I have different results. I modifyed the board to weaked a little the LED (weaker light, but much longer work time), added better cables and I put resin on board to prevent it from water. Now they shine even if other lamps dont want to work (because of the rain), and if weather is good, works up to 2h I think. I never was patient enought to measure it xD Already I got few deads lights (battery died) but my modded lights still works fine. I used 50F and 100F ultra capasitors. Putting all together was a little pain in ass but result is satisfying. One tip is to check the solar panel. Solar cells in resin panel can crack and lost their power (but voltage is still ok) and those glass cells can coroded if worker did not put enough hot glue under solar panel.
A man after my own heart Blu Tac board holder and lead solder 👍🏻
wow, great project. Thanks for sharing. ^0^
I would think restoring optical clarity to the cover of the solar panel would be absolutely critical… it looks like it needs every photon of sunlight it can possibly get. The “Tech ingredients” guy showed how much difference it can make to simply place the solar panel down into a concentrator sort of reverse lens that the sides are mirrored and tilted in such a way that the sunlight bounces off of these surfaces and on to the solar panel. Casts a bigger net, so to speak..
What are those batteries called.Thanks
I am curious. Because there isn't a battery management system in the solar light, with the open circuit voltage of the panel being about 3volt (I think) the super cap would be charged to the full 2.7 volts. Which when the solar lights LED turns on, would the higher voltage of the super cap be too much for the circuit powering the LED? As it's expecting 1.2volt? I love that your experimenting with these again, I started fiddling with them yesterday. Fun little things, and cheap!
Ah, ya know what, I watched the rest of the video and you answered my question. Nice! I usually watch the whole video before commenting. Should have waited! Thanks for the project idea! Any idea if this will work with the amorphous style solar lights? Those are just 1USD a piece here, could be fun to tinker with.
Should work with any solar light that has just one AA nicd/nimh battery, as they would need the joule thief or step up circuitry to get the roughly 3v needed to light the white leds.
tell me about that soldering iron
Just add another aa batt across existing battery will make it run longer....why make it work for less time,seems odd to me.
Can't Mix old solder with the new ones? Why not suck it off?
Great job lulling. .👍
I would have coated the board with paint or hot glue to keep the water/oxidization to a minimum. It sucks to have to take it apart every year to clean it up and rework the board. Especially here in the rainy Pacific NW.
Julian, do you have link for that soldering iron?
Mini TS100 a quick google search reveals
Can you build a tnc from an arduino i wana do packet radio with a handheald transciever :)
Use some flux to improve solderability.
Solder wick would've been easiest way to get both the solder and the corroded leg away from the pad.
So the corrosion may have been caused by some moisture getting in there? I suspect, since we can have electrical components inside a house like a graphics card and computer motherboard for decades and they still don't have corrosion. This is the cause of the corrosion also on the other parts. It maybe wasn't water literally dripping in, but maybe it was like mist in the morning and anything outside that has any holes in it will allow some mist to go inside it.
Either way, they rarely care about the long life of the solar light. There are much more expensive ones that use glass and rubber seals that probably would last a very long time and not allow moisture in. Here in Australia the most cheap solar garden light is 1 dollar, the expensive ones are around 8 or 10 dollars each.
Because here in Australia even the black plastic part on cheaper ones will just crack and fall apart after about 18 months in the sun. I like the ones with a metal top which looks like copper (but it actually some other type of steel with colour), and then of course the glass piece for the light (since plastic ones go cloudy and even yellow in time). All of my cheap solar garden lights literally fail within 2 years, but my expensive one has lasted around 6 years and still counting and all I had to do was replace it's battery and it had no corrosion in there either.
VFORVENOM Yep, you get what you pay for.
could have done it without cutting wires off battery holder.. 👍😎 plus the diode you removed is special low voltage one..
that scap can allow you to charge a cell phone with a usb step up and a hi quality small set up like that. it would only work under the sun but still,it's all you need really. the phone become your night light. i made advancements in caps by using a plus to plus connection but du to cap size and capacitance its take 1 inch more space than the battery size does. please try my set up and try to figure out how efficient it really is so far i get up to 100% when the charges and discharges are done in the right synchronicity.. i get to transfer the energy rather than wasting all of it.
UM I WONDER WHAT SOLDIER FLUX IS INTENDED FOR ???
Burn on blue wire oppppssssie
in theory could you have used an old cell phone battery? I'm guessing the battery would be somewhat protected from overcharging only from limitations of what the circuit thought it was going to charge, right? or would that be pointless and dangerous? (I'm just curious cuz I like to tinker but I'm not circuit handy)
Big Clive did a video on that wait a second
th-cam.com/video/ycFTxCoNAQk/w-d-xo.html here it is
Powercap Supercaps 36× 500F Battery Accu Solar Grid-Tie 2,7V Farad ➡️ th-cam.com/video/ihSc7Bj_oQk/w-d-xo.html
Homemade DIY 660Wp Sun Tracer Solar-Tracker ➡️ th-cam.com/video/X0lmYFwOq3U/w-d-xo.html
Every time I see you change the tip on this soldering iron, I grow sad because the designer missed the mark. They really should have used a ball bearing and spring for a detent instead of a set screw. Sad.
The 5252f is such a hackable chip. It _can_ be used to drive a flyback transformer and generate high voltage.
Its solar in pin for charging can _sort of_ be used as a "chip enable"/gate pin and vary the output level. Created a really shit sound generator out of this thing.
Who knows, it might be possible to create a radio transmitter out of this thing.
I glued three little Dollar Tree solar lights on the spinning blades of the ornamental windmill in the back yard and one to the tail fin. I replaced the couldn't make it through the night worn out AAA batteries with AA batteries. Easy to do, you cut off the AAA plastic and the AA will fit just right into the case and you can use the AAA contacts and spring. Thus far they are still working. I've got lots of things I ought to be fixing but there is something about looking out the kitchen sink window and watching those spinning lights that bumped the windmill to the top of the list. Next project is to make a solar charger for the AA batteries in the clocks hanging on the wall, I'll replace the LED with a diode. Should be enough light in the room to keep it working forever ........ or at least half of forever.
I've been wanting to do this with my outdoor battery-operated decorations. I want all my lit decorations to be powered by the sun and automatically turn on at night. Tell me how you go about this please or link me.
@UCmHvGf00GDuPYG9DZqQKd9A - Thanks for the video. Good electronics, could do with some better optics by polishing up the solar panel and the outer shell of the lamp.
So I have to ask what is the point of having a lamp that only runs for a matter of minutes? Is it just a academic exercise or do you have a special purpose for it?
Very interesting watching people doing things. If you replaced the supercapacitor with a piece of wood it would be downgraded even more.😁
Would it be useful to make a video explaining rather simply how to wrap one's head around the maths needed to calculate the running time of that LED? I would find it interesting. I mean.. I can imagine how it's written, that 1 farad delivering 1 amp for 1 second will lose 1 volt, but how to come to terms with a physical thing like that LED and circuit drawing whatever it does. It seems my brain doesn't work very well for this!
Thanks for the video, enjoy the sun!
You can polish the surface of the solar cell clear again with toothpaste or jewelers rouge and a felt pad on a dremel in a minute or two also. Same for the light cover. Get crazy with the hot glue gun to water proof the seals of the enclosure also. :P
Well i suppose it would work as a street light for the slugs and snails eh!
Chinese made. They use copper plated steel stranded wire. They do not take to flexing too well. After replacing with true copper wire add a dab of hot melt glue to add strain relief to them. If you can find silicone conformal coating spray, give them a few layers of coating. The corrosion will not return.
Why make it worse :( ??
Is there a reason this is a "super" capacitor? Or are we Q tipping the term?
My thoughts exactly. Like "Hot" water heater.
What's the brand and model # of your soldering iron?
TS100
@@JulianIlett Thanks!
What is the difference between a supper cap and a Normal cap. And where did you get them?
Alan
Nothing. The so call supper capacitor has more farads.
Same difference as between Superman and a normal man ? maybe :)
Supercaps use a different internal construction which allows the plates to be separated by self-forming insulating layers at nano-scale. This results in a massively increased capacitance - easily over a farad, orders of magnitude higher than any other type of capacitor. The down-side is that they have a very low maximum voltage, typically around 2.5V. The highest I've seen is 5V, and I suspect that was two matched capacitors in one package.
They are expensive and seemingly need to have huge numbers to make them useful and long time or high current to charge them for any heavy use. So appear to be the perfect way to part people from money. Li-po actually works now. They are also much bigger than Li-po at the same mAh I believe.
They have a few advantages over chemical batteries. They can achieve higher efficiency with proper management. They have enormous power density - if you think shorting a lipo can give you a lot of current, it's got nothing on a supercap. They barely age at all - ten year life without loss of capacity, even if you charge and discharge them a thousand times a day.
Hi Julian, interesting idea but anyway - there is another volune to place capacitor in and use another type of solar panel to charge it up, or am I wrong? And what about waterproofing it with some nail polish or resin? It is so wasteful to make these lights nearly one-year only - I mean that is producer fault... Cheers...
You need a bigger capacitor, if that one is 10F then if they made one to fill the whole battery area then it may be able to reach 100F. But even 100F will still reach it's 1.5v from this system faster than the batter would and it won't actually be holding it's 100F either, maybe only around half of that. So 55 or 50F and it will be around 0.05 watt hours.
I suspect it would only last around 3 hours. And with your smaller model here with the tiny cap I think only about 10-15 minutes you should expect it to run for. Because also the capacitor does constantly drop when being discharged.
A battery is always superior for these things. It will be cool when they do make high capacity capacitors in the future though. Because when they do this it would be a good fit for their usage as things like self discharge wouldn't matter as it would turn on and start going as soon as the sun goes down anyway and doesn't have to sit around holding it's charge. They would have to make a new circuit that would be able to get the most power out of the capacitor even when it hits voltages well under 1V also for it to be efficient. Imagine a capacitor the size of that battery compartment that is 1000F.
Caps will never replace batteries entirely of course, but I think in the future they will replace batteries in certain things which commonly go through charge and discharge very commonly like solar lights, battery toothbrush (which sits in it's dock), etc
VFORVENOM With Lithium based battery technology continuing to produce better batteries, I don't think super capacitor technology will ever catch up.
Disappointing ... we don't know the run time compared to the battery ?
It's so easier if you use a bit of flux when tinning things ..
Why did you use a supercapacitor?
What is that spike tool that's centre stage from about 7:15 onwards - it's not a screwdriver and you never seem to use it! A punch maybe?
Yeah, it's a spike/punch thing. I used it in the "I made a little Jig" video.
Looks very useful! Where'd you get it!
Almost certainly Maplin - decades ago :)
Ahh, shame - poor Maplins RIP...
Should wire a few together more solar
JULIAN! How could you? At 13:28, you burned one of your supercap leads with the soldering iron while you were attaching the solar panel :)
Will not last long because most of boost converter ICs stop working around 0.9V-1.2V
So half of the supercap is wasted. If resistance of diode is know you will get time about 0.5RC
You were lucky with resoldering the back of the PV Cells. i have some that WILL NOT take lead solder at all !. polish the PV cell with Silvo or toothpaste.
I have taken apart a couple of garden lights and found the red positive wire to the PV cell comes off rather easily ( weak solder connection ? ) Any suggestions on making a successful solder connection to a cell ? JwgK
@@jameskrivitsky9715 now days i think it may have been the lead free problem. Maybe look at using lead free solder.
@@zukjeff Thanks, I'll give it a try.
Nice tutorial.
Why??
Why anything ever??