Low Cost Harbor Breeze Solar Light Enclosure

[Aaron Bull Schaefer]

Hey all,

There's a great post on the Meshtastic community website about using a cheap solar light from Lowe's as a solar mesh node enclosure [1]. It includes a solar panel, a 1500mAh 18650 Lithium Ion battery, and charge controller in a weather resistant package. You can open the housing, throw in a LoRa board wired to the battery, cut a hole to mount an antenna, and you've got a stealthy solar node.

I went to Lowe's out on Sprague this afternoon to see if I could find one, and bought a couple of the lights for $9.98 a piece! Note that there are two different 60 lumen lights at the same price point, but you want the one that has a less-boxy housing for the solar panel [2]. If you read the attached labels carefully, you'll see that the boxier version has a smaller 1000mAh 18500 battery, so get the linked version.

I'm still working on assembling my first one to see if it's actually able to keep the node running, but thought I'd share it with you. It might not be the most robust node in the world, but it's hard to source usable parts for any cheaper than that!

[1] https://meshtastic.org/docs/community/enclosures/rak/harbor-breeze-solar-hack/

[2] https://www.lowes.com/pd/Harbor-Breeze-60LM-Solar-Flood-Light-0-6-Watt-Black-Solar-LED-Flood-Light/1002689960

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Aaron

[Aaron Bull Schaefer]

I've finished building the node (pictures attached) and have it out front to test for a few days before finding a better place for deployment. Unfortunately, I only had a spare Heltec V3 with a (relatively) power-hungry ESP32 chip, so I'm not confident that it will be able to hold a charge. The next few days are supposed to be cloudy and rainy, so at least we'll get a good water resistance test as well. I've got a RAK4631 board ordered and on the way, which is about 10x more efficient, but I'm not sure if the full-sized version will fit in the Harbor Breeze enclosure cleanly.

Incidentally, I found a nice online calculator for proper solar tilt angle based on your location [1]. I know the above node isn't ideally set up, but I wanted to keep the antenna vertical. Cheers!

[1] https://sunsolartilt.com/pages/calculator

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Aaron

[Aaron Bull Schaefer]

Some bad news on this node...it worked fine for that first day and was charging the battery as expected, but drained completely overnight and I don't think it's come back online since. I thought maybe it was just those cloudy/rainy days, but since then, we've had plenty of direct sun and it hasn't popped back up. I'll have to bring it inside and try to diagnose what happened to it (maybe water damage?), but I think using one of the more efficient boards would go a long way for this compact setup. I'll post back once I've had a chance to pull it apart again.

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Aaron

[Aaron Bull Schaefer]

Quick update on this node. When I opened it back up, everything was fine inside, just the battery was dead. This morning I swapped the Heltec V3 for a mini RAK19003 board and put it back outside. I'm really hoping it will be able to keep a charge!

NOTE: If you're looking to use this enclosure...it's difficult to drill a hole for the antenna that will allow it to remain vertical while having the solar panel at the proper angle of 34.6°. If I were to do it again, I might try to run the pigtail down into the LED light housing and drill the hole for the SMA connector in the side of that to provide more flexibility with positioning.

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Aaron