I found a set of 10 for 25$ so I bought 3 boxes and have 30 lights from Big Lots. Was thinking about making a change controller for all the panels and combined them in series and parallel.
Has anyone here ever make your own charge controller or have tried any experiments with these solar lights lmk, I will want to try to make my own charge controller with an arduino but don't know what kind of programming I should involve.
Never used an arduino before so any info on that would also be handy.

Each light has 350ma 1.5 volt AA battery and 2v 20-120ma solar cell (idk the true value of the ma on solar cell cause I haven't measured it yet)

other idea is to leave the batteries in them and cutting off the led and rest of load from the circuit (daytime sensor) so that the panels will change the batteries and then link them like that.

Thanks for reading please leave comments or ideas pertaining to solar lights and reusing them for other things.

This post was edited by implite on May 6 2015 10:45am

# status update

I hooked up 10 and in series and in full sun I get 13.90 volts and I should be able to get 3 amps of current fully charged from the new battery's I have upgraded (3000ma 1.2volt ). I robbed a blocking diode out of an old power supply and found out it was perfect for my experiment ( diode could handle 40v and 5 amps ) so I can block my panels robbing the volts out of my battery's at night. For arduino change controller ill need to learn c or c++ I have studied some c++ but haven't been into it since they changed iostream.h so idk how to use it anymore but relearning is always fun.

This post was edited by implite on May 19 2015 05:19pm