Friday, 13 April 2018

Flash an LED with an extremely low power source


Let's say I have a very low power solar cell, which is producing a couple of uA of current at 100-200 mV for an output power of a few hundred nW. What I would like to know is what is the best (most efficient) way to flash an LED using this as the only power source? I'm aware that a typical LED consumes maybe 40 mW, so I could at best hope to turn flash the LED for maybe 10 ms every half an hour or so.



I am not an electrical engineer by training, nor very adept with circuit design and analysis, so I'm not sure if there's a relatively simple circuit that could used consisting only of capacitors, resistors, and mosfets and/or zener diodes, or if I would be better off trying to utilize a power management IC with a boost converter, something like the TI BQ25504 or the LTC3108.


My sense is that these ICs are overkill for something that I would imagine is relatively simple, but my Google-fu is failing to come up with an approach for something like this.




No comments:

Post a Comment

arduino - Can I use TI's cc2541 BLE as micro controller to perform operations/ processing instead of ATmega328P AU to save cost?

I am using arduino pro mini (which contains Atmega328p AU ) along with cc2541(HM-10) to process and transfer data over BLE to smartphone. I...