Bill’s Blog

Once I got the solar powered webcam working, I started thinking about how to make it more power efficient.  Looking at the specs of the inverter, I found it consumers 3W all the time.  That’s a lot of power wasted.  To make things more power efficient, I replaced the inverter with a circuit I built.  It is a highly efficient 12v to 5v switcher.  The picture below shows the near finished product.  It all fit in a box slightly smaller than the inverter.  Now that it is installed, the battery lasts about twice as long.