3mo ago

My solar powered everyday carry electronics

Hope this fits here.

It's not much in the grand scheme, but all of my everyday carry electronics are all solar charged.

Left to right: Cat S22 Flip smartphone, Bluetooth earbuds, rechargable pen light/laser pointer/black light/dog toy, and my Kobo e-reader.

They're mostly charged / topped up overnight from my 12W / 8000 mAh solar battery bank. I just throw it outside or in a window during the day and plug a USB hub into it to charge my devices overnight. My phone will usually go 2-3 days on a charge, but I've also got a 6W panel I stick in the window if it needs a little battery boost during the day. I also top off other things from the 6W panel, but those aren't exclusively solar like my EDC stuff.

Thought I was going to have to cheat a week or so ago. It was rainy and cloudy for nearly 2 weeks, and the solar battery bank was struggling to stay above 50%, but the clouds finally broke and my solar bank was able to fully recharge with a few hours of sunlight to spare.

Like I said, it's not much, but these have only ever been charged from solar**, and I think that's pretty cool.

** Except the bit of charge my phone and e-reader got from my laptop when I had it plugged into USB to flash firmware and add files.

My solar battery bank. (Not the best design with an integrated, non-removable battery, but has worked well enough)

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26 comments

Ngl. I’m an apple fan boy.
But. That cat22 has come across my mind quite a few times over the last few weeks.
- I realize it's not for everyone, but I absolutely love this thing. My old smartphone has been demoted to wifi tablet when I need it, but it mostly lives in my bag.
  
  Did you get this phone so you use it less? Or what's your reason for having this little guy? Genuinely curious.
  
  Several reasons, but digital detoxing was one of the goals.
  Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if I could go 30 days in the modern world with a dumb phone. This one was actually cheaper than the other dumb phone I was looking at but was more capable (I also liked that I could re-purpose it after the experiment was over). I just disabled a lot of its functionality for the 30 day challenge to dumb it down to just what a modern dumb phone can do. Challenge was successful, but afterward, for quality of life, I re-enabled the app store, browser, and allowed myself some basic apps (bank, TOTP, email, Matrix, etc).
  I'm beyond bored with the "tall skinny rectangle" form factor and wanted to try something different. I'm old enough that T9/tap typing is still in my muscle memory, so that was a surprisingly easy transition. Only took me about a day to get back into the full swing of it.
  I spent too much time doom scrolling. During the 30 day challenge, I cut out most of that by way of not having it available. Afterward, the small screen and weird form factor kind of helped reinforce that. I do have a Lemmy client on there, lol, and have posted from it.
  After using it for 30 days, I found that I just didn't really miss my tall skinny rectangle all that much and decided to stick with it (after un-dumbing it). It covers all of my needs and most of my wants. I still keep my actual smartphone in my bag if I need it, but it's mostly just a mini wifi tablet that sees occasional use.
  
  Awesome. Thank you for the detailed answer. For me, I've been reading books religiously lately. So, I've been way less on my PC and my phone than I used to. I'm on my work PC 8 hours a day and after work was doing it, too. So I wasn't feeling good after the day ends. Much better now.
  
  I know it sounds like some tone-deaf parent saying it, but putting the phone down and going and doing literally anything else really has been the breath of fresh air I didn't realize I needed. I've also been doing a lot of reading lately, too. The Kobo was a fairly recent "treat yo' self" addition because when I did read my ebooks, I did it from my phone.
  
  Oh absolutely. Keep it up. Life has so much more to it than social media. Especially for us who grew up without internet and know what it was before.
  
  Thank you!
  See everything you just said is what I’m thinking…
  I’d prefer a dumb phone to get away from online crap.
  But I have to have TOTP and banking and security apps
  So … this really makes pause and think
  
  Here's some things I found in my research before I bought that one. Maybe you'll find them helpful since you're looking at it from the same angle I was.
  Modern dumb phones have come a ways since the mid 00's. The few dumb phones I was looking at also support hotspot. That was the big thing that pushed me to try this since I frequently rely on my phone being a hotspot for work, and I assumed dumb phones couldn't do that. Seems like that's a fairly common feature on them these days.
  A lot of them run KaiOS (which is kind-of FirefoxOS in the same way that Android is a Linux distro). They have decent web browsers (Firefox, obv) as well as apps, including TOTP. The only reason I "need" the bank app versus the online banking through the web browser is occasionally needing to do a few things that only the app can do (scan to deposit checks, etc). I was willing to go without the bank app, though.
  I was originally looking at the Nokia 2780. The only reason I went with this one instead of a true dumb/feature phone is that I knew I could use this one as a SIP handset, if nothing else, after my 30 day challenge was up. It was also about $15 cheaper than the Nokia, so that pretty much sealed it. I could probably get by with a regular dumb phone, but this one is kind of the perfect middle ground for me.

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