Super Capacitor as Battery Calculator (works with alpha 347)

[donnybowers]

I wrote this program to estimate how long I can run a Light Emitting Diode (3.6v 20ma LED) on a Super Capacitor. It's completely theoretical right now. I haven't tested the accuracy, and it doesn't account for the fact that the LED circuit I'm using (called a joule thief) will only run the LED until the capacitor drains to about .8 volts. But, I figure when I get around to testing, this will be a good theoretical starting point to decide how big a super capacitor I will need for a certain number of hours of LED light. I ordered a 500 farad super capacitor and put it in with my other electronic hobby stuff about six months ago and that's as far as I've gotten with the project so far. Does anyone know if there's a programming language called L.A.Z.Y?

expressed in volts, farads and amp hours. Will need to be converted to decimal if using micro-farads instead of farads. 

Works with alpha 347 Linux:


print "SUPER CAPACITOR AS A BATTERY"
[start]
print "----------------------------"
input " Volts: ";volts
input " Farads: ";farads
ampseconds=farads*volts
Ah=ampseconds/3600
Ah$=using("#.###", Ah)

LEDhours=Ah/0.02
LEDhours$=using("###.###", LEDhours)
print "_______________"
print Ah$;" Amp Hours"
print LEDhours$;" LED hours"
input "Again [y/n]";yn$
if lower$(yn$)="y" then goto [start]

end


If you try it, let me know how it works for you, what op sys platform you're using and any improvement ideas you have for it.

Hopefully knowing that the USING command appears to be working in alpha 347 for Linux will be helpful to Carl.

[BeeTrap]

Thanks for this.  I have made SEVERAL small LED lights as gifts using different battery setups, but never tried a Capacitor.  I may have to now.  My bestest LED light uses a pair of repurposed Lion Batteries from a dead laptop and hold up well.  Are you using Capacitors for long life, storage capacity, or......?  I ran your code on a AMD AMD Phenom II X6 1100T with 16GB DDR3-1333 / PC3-10600 DDR3 SDRAM UD under Windows 10 Pro 64-bit, if that is what you wanted.  Whenever I want to create a new LED light I often have to use "Resistor Version 1.0" from http://www.mentala.com.  I know that you may already have similar, but this is for others.  Stefan Pendl did create "Adding some eye-candy" Liberty BASIC code for Resistor calculations but it does not work "backwards" -- enter "value" and show "color bands" as does the previous program.  I have never written any code in Liberty BASIC for these calculations as there are many online calculators for such.  But I would very much like to see any Liberty Code for anything along those lines.  I am a retired Tool and Die Maker and just love to tinker. 

[donnybowers]

Feb 26, 2019 9:04:18 GMT -5 BeeTrap said:

...  Are you using Capacitors for long life, storage capacity, or......?     

Mainly the idea is for longevity. Batteries are probably more cost efficient (though maybe only short term), but I'm thinking of making some lights (maybe yard lights or something) that will last without ever having to change the battery. Capacitors are known to normally last for decades. Of course the super capacitors will probably outlive the LEDs so the next step is to set up the light so that it's easy to change the LED. LOL

But I had one blow (a small capacitor) in a store bought house LED bulb the other day. Usually one of the LEDs get's a black spot on it showing that it's the reason for the bulb's failure. In this one the capacitor canister blew right off the paper coil.

On another note, I actually cut up the disks in my dead LED lights into individual LEDs and reuse the good LEDs believe it or not. It doesn't work in all bulbs though. Some have too thick of a metal disk to be worth trying to cut into pieces. You can solder wires onto the ends of those little corn cob LEDs. A little tricky, but doable. I also save the bulb casing and make 12 volt camp lights and emergency lights for the house out of them.

I'm a retired machinist (mostly CNC) and I love to tinker too. I've thought about starting a forum specifically for topics like this. Not sure what to call it or how to define it so that it's not too overly broad a topic, and yet not so narrow that only a few would be interested. Any ideas on that?

I've thought about "Alternative Energy on the Cheap" or "Poor Man's Emergency Lighting", but thought it might be too narrow to attract participants. Then again, maybe there's already a good one out there I could just join.

[BeeTrap]

I just read what "metro" said on
libertybasiccom.proboards.com/post/2986/thread
under the Suggestions section and that would be a "start" for where to share code. I am a member on the Yahoo Groups and have gotten code from there. It is a little odd, for me anyway, to search for anything though. But if you were to give us a GOOD LINK or location, I would give it a look. My problem is that I don't have a project of my own right now and that is why I enjoy trying almost ANY code to see what it does.

[donnybowers]

Feb 27, 2019 8:53:06 GMT -5 BeeTrap said:

I just read what "metro" said on
libertybasiccom.proboards.com/post/2986/thread
under the Suggestions section and that would be a "start" for where to share code. I am a member on the Yahoo Groups and have gotten code from there. It is a little odd, for me anyway, to search for anything though. But if you were to give us a GOOD LINK or location, I would give it a look. My problem is that I don't have a project of my own right now and that is why I enjoy trying almost ANY code to see what it does. 

My problem is that I can't stand Yahoo Groups. I find it next to impossible to find anything in there. And it's hard to read when you do find what you're looking for. I signed up a long time ago just to be able to use the LB group, but it was so useless that I don't think I could even remember my user name any more. I haven't even tried to log in in at least 2 or 3 years.