[Peripherals] Charging the XO off a dynamo

[Arjun Sarwal]

>
> Do you think we should tell the OLPC team that their laptop says it's
> charging when its actually not?  Can anything be done for that?  Maybe not.

Richard __is__ the OLPC team who'd be interested to know about this.
I'm sure he'd be very surprised to hear what you've described....

Thanks for sharing all the details. Please keep us posted about your
progress on using multiple dynamos.

regards
Arjun


On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 8:40 PM, Holden Bonwit <hbonwit04 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> So I have some bad news, and that's simply to confirm what you guys thought
> would be true:
>    the standard bike dynamo can't source enough current to charge the XO.
>
> The charge light comes on, and (if the laptop is powered up) the indicator
> says 'charging' but, in fact, there are zero amps going in.  The voltage on
> the charge line is pulled down to 10 volts as soon as the light pops on,
> just as you predicted.
>
> So there are two possible solutions, and I'm looking into both:
> First off, someone said they knew of bike dynamos that can output same
> voltage range with up to 2 amps provided.
> Second, there is always the option to bolt a second, standard dynamo onto
> the bike and hope this helps.
>
> I just checked the wall wart charger, and now I see that it is 12 V, 1.42 A.
> Standard bike dyno is 12 V, 0.5 A.  So its possible that two in conjunction
> won't work either.
>
> Anyway, just wanted to give an update, despite being a bummer one.
>
> Do you think we should tell the OLPC team that their laptop says it's
> charging when its actually not?  Can anything be done for that?  Maybe not.
>
> -HB
>  ==
> Holden Bonwit
> hbonwit at alumni.nd.edu



-- 
Arjun Sarwal
Intern, One Laptop per Child
Email: arjun at laptop.org
IRC: arjs on irc.freenode.net in #olpc, #olpc-health, #sugar