Today I have received the components from Farnell and the AEM10941 harvesting ICs from E-peas. I used a solder stencil from Elecrow, chipquik SMD291SNL10 solder paste and used an solder paste spreader from OSH Stencil, basically a credit card sized piece of plastic. I placed components on 3 PCBs.
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Using a Yihua 858D hot air gun I have reflowed the board without the solar cells, those I soldered manually because I didn't want to heat them for too long. According to the datasheet they should be soldered using low temperature solder paste or manually but very shortly.
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Then it was time for the first test. I soldered a small Lipo battery (20x20x6mm) and I went outside, the sun had just set I could measure the 3.3V output which is only available after cold start.
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In addition I measured the boost voltage 4.0V and the buck voltage 2.2V and this all is as expected. I measured 0.95V on the solar cells output which is as expected (about 2 x 0.5V). Aparently it is working, but I need to do some more testing to confirm. For example comparing the solar current to the battery charge current, which should be about 5 times lower. After that I can power an application with it. I have a $15 bluetooth low energy temperature/humidity sensor that advertizes sensor data at some interval.
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