Mount over 60 Watts of solar panels on the back of a circa-1987 Dave Scott Centurion bicycle and you get a pretty powerful phone, tablet and even laptop charging system. We built this in celebration of NYC’s Bike to Work Day.

Here’s the setup…

We started with this Jamstand for DJs and cut down the legs a bit with an angle grinder so it would fit on our bicycle trailer.

The Jamstand is mounted on this cheap and simple bicycle trailer.

We made a frame for 4 of our 16.8 Watt portable solar panels to get gives you 67 Watts @ 18V.

We can control the angle to point them directly at the sun for fast charging.

The panels feed into 4 V60 universal laptop batteries in this lockable drawer. They have 60 Watt hours of capacity which translates into up to 8 smartphone charges. With a solar panel connected, you can keep them charging all day.

The USB output is capable of 2A output, so split that to get 8 1A outputs. We went out to a mix of MicroUSB, Apple 30 Pin and Apple Lightning Adapters mounted on a nice soft felt surface (we don’t want to scratch anyone’s new S4).

During this test run over Brooklyn cobblestones, we realized that we didn’t have support for the drawer so that had to be beefed up.

We’re ready to charge!

Email us if you’re interested in renting this mobile charging machine.

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