module suggestion: solar power / li-po charger shield.

[niknak]

Hi,

as the tinyduino is so small and low power, it strikes me that giving it a sustainable power source would be a good idea.   clearly there's nighttime too, so having a charger and (matched) solar connector to store energy for nighttime use would be appealing.

... being able to use a mini wind, or even water flow based system could also be interesting.

Nick

[KeithJRome]

I thought pretty much the same thing and was hoping to find time to design a small self-contained power source using one of those tiny energy harvesting ICs from Linear Tech once I get my boards in.

The tricky thing is that with such a small trickle of power coming in, you probably can't run the project full-time. It would need to spend most of its time in a low-power sleep mode to conserve charge. This isn't a big problem when programming AVR microcontrollers directly, since I think pretty much all of them support light and deep sleep modes, but I'm not sure how it would work when using Arduino libraries (perhaps it's exactly the same).

Piezo/thermal energy sources could also be interesting.