There's been a good amount of progress on the planning for the solar-powered stereo, so I wanted to share a few things. First, the casing.
I want to make the case out of wood (so it can easily be built to a custom size), and as it turns out, my old college roommate has gotten quite good with woodworking, and when I visited him recently, we talked about making the case ourselves. We made a mockup in SketchUp (the free CAD program) and were able to come up with a pretty great way to fit all the pieces in a pretty compact size. Here's what we have so far:
We put the speakers in a diagonal arrangement, and then in the opposite diagonal we have the battery and a storage compartment that will allow access to the controls for the amplifier, and also have audio and power connections for iPods, etc. The back panel and door to the storage compartment are not yet designed or shown here. On top is the solar panel, which we plan on removing from the plastic housing it comes with, recessing it into the wood on the top, then adding a sheet of plexiglass over it (the solar panel is glass and as a result pretty delicate, so it will be necessary to put a protective layer of plexiglass over it. There's a little extra wood at the top to secure the plexiglass down. The sides, top and bottom will be pine wood, and the front panel will be simple plywood. It will be recessed in a bit, making it easier to build, and also allowing for a speaker grill material to be placed over it.
The overall dimensions of the casing are currently 11 1/2 inches tall, 14 inches wide, and 5 1/4 inches deep, which I think is about as compact as we can get with these parts. These dimensions will probably change slightly as we build it out, but this design should be fairly close to the final result I believe.
On the electronics side of things, here's the diagram of the circuit I'm going to use for this stereo:
The battery is on the left where it says 8Ah (amp hours). It's necessary to have a fuse to prevent the power in the battery from overloading anything, and that's the 3A (3 amp fuse). At the top is the solar panel and it's charging indicator LED (comes with the panel), the AUX is the cigarette lighter, and the Amp is the Amp. The speakers and audio input are also in the diagram. The amp, battery, cigarette lighter, and solar panel all have grounds. Normally if the case was conductive, you would just connect the grounds to the case. But I'm planning on a wooden case, so it will not be conductive, so I will just tie all of the ground wires together instead.
For this project I plan on using 16 gauge wire (though according to the American wire gauge standards, maybe only 24 would be necessary, but might as well have some overhead) , and the 3 amp fuses I will use are the ATC type, though it's probably possible to use other types, but the fuse and fuse housings must match in this regard. Here's some additional items I bought on amazon to complete the wiring:
Hopefully all the electronics parts will arrive by early next week, and I can wire everything together and test it.
Here's a link to my initial post about the solar-powered stereo project:
