nocturne@slrpnk.net Yeah, I would rec refining your vision - you aren’t building a solar charger for your bike, but building a solar system which can charge anything.
I won’t say I’m an expert in these systems, but my recollection from building out my van about a decade ago was that you want solar panels, a charge controller, a battery bank (maybe), something for your load to plug into, and an inverter or adapter for your bike.
Electricity comes from the solar panels, but it varies in volatage or amperage (i forget) as the sun varies in intensity. A charge controller smooths this out, and will output the appropriate constant voltage at an amperage determined by your load. The battery is there to accumulate power when you arent running anything on the system - after all, the sun shines during the day, which is probably also when you want to ride your bike. Also, I remember something about it is dangerous to not have a battery on some charge controllers, since the electricity needs somewhere to go even if you have no load - but maybe thats bullshit. So the CC and BAT work together to provide power for you to use for whatever load you want, but it is DC power. From here, you have to choose between the more expensive and dumb path, or the more adventurous and dumb path.
The expensive and dumb path is to get an inverter to convert your power to AC. This will let you plug your bike in like a normal wall outlet. Done. But inverters cost an annoying amount of money, and you are also wasting a good chunk of your generated electricity converting from DC to AC, which would be fine if you actually needed AC - but then you are losing even more power converting back from AC to DC. Ridikidonk! But this has the added benefit that you can also just plug, like, your laptop charger in if you just want a normal outlet to use.
The adventurous and dumb option is to modify your charger and/or make your own charger to convert from (probably) 12v DC to whatever voltage your bike needs. Iirc, amperage listed on the charger doesn’t denote how much current you need to provide - your power source will provide as much amperage as it can until it runs out of power - but denotes the maximum amperage the device will take. Presumably, this should be as simple as getting some little electronic componenet to step up your voltage to an appropriate level, and then getting that electricity into your bike charging port… but if the charging port on your bike is proprietary, like the other user said, the easiest solition is chopping off the end of the cable and using that. A slightly more difficult but still easy enough (maybe?) option would be to splice in an alrernate charging port on the bike itself that you could use when at home, keeping OG cable as-is for charging on the go. Or maybe the cable connector isnt proprietary, just obscure, and you can find a supplier on alibaba.
So you have solar, charge controller, battery, and inverter or load. Between all these are wires. The wires need to be the correct guage to handle the anticipated amperage, or they will catch on fire. Then you need to put fuses in all the wires in case they end up with too much amperage anyway, so they don’t catch on fire. And then just in case they catch on fire just because, or someone starts getting electricuted by your poorly planned system, you’ll want some clearly labelled and accessible cutoff switches between solar/CC, CC/BAT, and CC/load.
As you can see, this is, in fact a whole thing. And I do wonder if everything I just wrote was a mistake, and you may be better off just building a dedicated bike-charging system using more basic electrical components… but hopefully you have a better idea of the problem space. I expect your challenges will be:
- Taming the wiley solar output.
- Ensuring sufficient power for the bike’s needs even in non-ideal solar conditions.
- That friggin charger connector.
poVoq@slrpnk.net
perestroika@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
These guys sell those chargers for 15 euros. Not sure if the chargers work, but the plugs look compatible and they have positive reviews.
www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008383594311.html
That one is not available in the states, but it showed others that are. Thank you!