Pinebook Solar charging

[Soul_Hacker]

Hello, I am pretty new here.
I got my Pinebook a few weeks ago and everything seems fine except a few flaws which are not as important to me for now.

Whats actually a great thing about the Pinebook is its battery-life...
I highly recommend buying the USB-to-Power Cord along with your Pinebook.

Now to my experiment. I challenged the Pinebook to LIVE WITHOUT A POWER OUTLET FOR TWO WEEKS.
And it went very well with my setup which is pretty low-end.

• Pinebook with USB powercord
  
• 700mWh Powermonkey Powerbar
  
• and a Solar Panel from Solarmonkey which has the same size as two large smartphones
  

   

So i tried working*/browsing with my Pinebook all (sunny) day while i let the powerbank charge, and if i needed power is would just plug it into the powerbank.
(If you plug it directly into the Solar panel it will only "slowly discharge")
If the weather really was bad (cloudy weather works) you could still work practically 24/7 for one day.
If you have a good weather condition and load the powerbank to full charge, you can work almost 2 days without sun.
The Pinebook is pretty happy with 4.3V for charging it seems.

*Sys- and Network-admin Stuff; Light Programming

tl;dr
So if you actually want to live off the grid for a few days or just wondered if you should buy a powerbank and/or a solar-panel for your Pinebook (and other Devices).
YES TOTTALLY DO IT, it works great. if you have a better/larger Solar Panel you could probably charge this thing.

[Luke]

Good first post I must say. You may just be the first person to try use the PB in a truly novel way (and post about it); that's kind of the purpose of this device - a mobile platform to mod, hack and experiment with rather than an alternative to much more powerful x86 laptops. 

As for your post. Depending on the usage scenario (what you do with it and how frequently you do it) and how much sun you get where you live, I can see the PB going for longer than 2 weeks while powered / topped-up by solar panels. 

I use my 11" strictly for work (filling in forms, online reports and assessment related to my vocation) once every 2 days or so for a period of ~2hrs at a time. Below you'll find a graph depicting battery usage over the past 7days:



The standby time for this thing is really quite amazing - more akin to a tablet (as you'd expect) than a traditional laptop. I known nothing about solar panels, put perhaps a mod that would cover the lid with those small and flexible solar panels could be a next step in your experiment

[Soul_Hacker]

Well thank you Luke. 
That's why i bought the PB.

Damn i should have included graphs, but mine are pretty straight because i never deplete nor fully load the battery (you know, Lithium-Ion doesn't like that very much)
Yes, it would totally endure more than two weeks with perfect weather but who has that? 
I tried this in Central Europe and we had a heat-wave for 3 weeks so that was easy, it still works with cloudy weather tho.

To my usage: Mostly terminal work (ping, portscan, nmap, wireshark,...), a bit of Mails and light browsing (mostly in APIs)
always in max brightness with a DE (XFCE and MATE equally).

I thought about strapping a bigger solar panel to the top (maybe with Velcro so you can work in the shade while charging)
cause the heat the PB generates is not that of a problem in high temp conditions... unless the plastic melts away of course.

Now i really prefer it to my Dell XPS15 simply because Windows10 sucks for my needs. A simple great little linux machine.
btw i got the 14" model.