actually that reminds me — there’s a series on youtube about putting solar panels on machines and checking whether they generate enough power to power the device
so they put solar panels on a car and check whether the car runs,
they put solar panels on drones to check whether they fly
would this work for a laptop? how much solar panel area do you need to run the laptop? I assume 30W power usage, that means you need 0.15 m² solar panels under full sunlight, my laptop has like 15x20 cm which is 0.03 m² … so, you could only use it 20% of the time to give it time to recharge.
With a super lightweight laptop, 5w is achievable during light usage. I have one that draws that. It’s usable for Google Docs sort of stuff indefinitely on a 5w charger. It can also go down to ~2.2w with low screen brightness and very low load. It is absolutely terrible though, celeron 3855u. I got Minecraft Java to run at 60 fps though… But it was probably using 7-12w then.
With a modern arm chip, you could get pretty great performance at that power draw. My phone (snapdragon 8 gen 3) in power saving mode can be like 5-10x faster at about 6 watts it seems like.
30 Watts at idle is desktop territory, a laptop should be maybe half that nowadays. I’d love to check at the wall with a watt meter, but my older ThinkPad does not have a removable battery anymore and I cannot say how much it would draw just from a USB-C power supply.
That really depends on many factors, including type of CPU, RAM, thermal setup, screen size and brightness, radios etc. But you can test that pretty easily with a wall wart kill-a-watt type meter or a usb-c tester.
actually that reminds me — there’s a series on youtube about putting solar panels on machines and checking whether they generate enough power to power the device
so they put solar panels on a car and check whether the car runs,
they put solar panels on drones to check whether they fly
would this work for a laptop? how much solar panel area do you need to run the laptop? I assume 30W power usage, that means you need 0.15 m² solar panels under full sunlight, my laptop has like 15x20 cm which is 0.03 m² … so, you could only use it 20% of the time to give it time to recharge.
With a super lightweight laptop, 5w is achievable during light usage. I have one that draws that. It’s usable for Google Docs sort of stuff indefinitely on a 5w charger. It can also go down to ~2.2w with low screen brightness and very low load. It is absolutely terrible though, celeron 3855u. I got Minecraft Java to run at 60 fps though… But it was probably using 7-12w then.
With a modern arm chip, you could get pretty great performance at that power draw. My phone (snapdragon 8 gen 3) in power saving mode can be like 5-10x faster at about 6 watts it seems like.
Most laptops come with 100W bricks, 30W is consumption at idle but most consume around 60W when under load
30 Watts at idle is desktop territory, a laptop should be maybe half that nowadays. I’d love to check at the wall with a watt meter, but my older ThinkPad does not have a removable battery anymore and I cannot say how much it would draw just from a USB-C power supply.
That really depends on many factors, including type of CPU, RAM, thermal setup, screen size and brightness, radios etc. But you can test that pretty easily with a wall wart kill-a-watt type meter or a usb-c tester.