Oh well, a lot of people in the northern hemisphere had their share of cold, sun light deprived winter weather but rest assured, the next summer season will come soon and with it plenty of sun light hours per day.

We will soon have a look to the latest collection of sun hungry solar bags but for today we have a fabric solar panel for your consideration that can serve as sun-shade on your patio and will generate lot of electrical power at the same time.

A company called ShadePlex is offering this powerful sun shade textile. Actually the textile itself is not power generating but serves as a frame for the flexible solar panels giving them support and a means to be used as sunshades or to cover other objects with sun power generating ability.

These solar power fabrics are light weight compared with conventional metal framed solar panels, can be stored easily by rolling up and can be put up in sunny places as easy as to place a sun umbrella or tent.

Properties our adventure trip loving readers who want to explore the remote corners of our world could consider, helping to keep the GPS and other devices alive. No need to lug around heavy batteries that need to be disposed somewhere.

But not so fast, ShadePlex is just starting operation and will serve first B2B which means it will take some time until you could consider having solar fabric as part of the adventure travel gear – just let’s hope it won’t take too long.

[source]

Finland based Suntrica is a young company exploring the possibilities of thin, lightweight solar panels as wearable add-on solution for clothing and bags.

An interesting idea as such self-containing add-on module allows to quickly and easily move it from one bag to another, leave it at home when no sun is shining.

Personally I like the integration of flexible solar panels, I don’t mind if my solar panel has no use while being under an overcast sky as the integration takes away the need to take care and not loose another item in my growing ‘gadgetery’ I am carrying around.

Nevertheless, some people might like the modular solution and the next best thing I could imagine using is Suntrica’s SolarStrap™, a lightweight, flexible  solar-charging badge containing on one half the flexible solar panel capable of harvesting 50mAh by full sun light and housing on the other half the storage battery with a capacity of 950mAh, larger enough to fill up most cell-phones and MP3 player when fully charged.

The power output is rated at 5.5V at 800mA via mini USB and a selection of the most common cellphone adaptors. The weight of the SolarStrap is 60g and the dimension when folded is 144×97x25mm.

The SolarStrap might not the most powerful solar charging solution but it is small to be placed quickly anywhere on your bag or body and being small and freely placable you can alway adjust the placement to point straight into the sun achieving the maximum on solar power harvesting.

A interesting concept / product but I couldn’t find any shop who is selling it and no price information was available as of today. I will watch out if the SolarStrap becomes commercially available.

I was able to talk during my TechTextil visit in frankfurt with Jürgen Thalmayer from Interactive Wear about the recent launch of their e-Textile designer kit.

Interactive Wear is not planning at this moment to open a online store on their Website. Orders for a designer kit can be made by sending an email with your wish-list to the following address: info@interactive-wear.com or call the following number: +49-8151-55506-0 (Germany).

There are some pre-packaged kits available like the iSolarX containing solar panels (flexible or rigid) attached with conductive textile cable, storage battery pack, battery pack charger (for those cloudy days) and a large selection of connector adapters to connect to almost any portable device.

Other kits available are the iLightX containing all components needed to integrate LEDs or EL decals into textiles, the iThermX for textile heating system design and the iComX kit for communication apparel design.

Although these 4 application clusters have pre-packed kits Interactive Wear is more than happy to bundle kit for specific designer needs. Just send you wish-list and you get all the goodies you need for your next great design.

I am very impressed with the documentation these kits have included. Not only a detail description about the best use of the components, the does and don’ts but also a wealth of tips coming from the hands-on experience from Interactive Wear how the components can be used in various different ways. This provides an excellent starting point for inspiring e-textile designers.

As previously mentioned, the price for the kits is between between €50,- and €150,- ($70.- and $207.-) depending on the actual materials requested. If you have trouble to contact Interactive Wear drop me a line and I will help to make the connection.

Solar textiles might still be a bit far away but flexible, thin film solar panel material like Konarka a leader in the flexible solar film market is developing, provide a option to integrate solar power charging function into clothing and bags.

A smart and environmentally interesting product, the Powerbrella™ is the latest development Konarka is exploring in partnership with SKYShades a Florida-based company making retractable and fixed architectural ‘SKYbrellas’.

The Powerbrella™ is designed for use at outdoor venues such as cafés and restaurants, hotel and resort swimming pools and outdoor lounges to provide customers coverage from the sun while the suns energy is used to power their laptop, cell phone or other portable devices.

It’s a brilliant, sunny idea using umbrellas which protect us for getting sunburns, catch the suns energy and make best use of it, generating power next the the pool or on the beach where mains connections are usually rare.

Because of the large areas of sun shades the power generation capability allow the Powerbrella™ to charge everything you can carry outdoors with you.

With the emergence of new products like the Powerbrella™ with it’s high potential of commercial success, the need for larger quantities of thin film, flexible solar panels will go up and hopefully the price drops because of large scale production efficiency making them more affordable to be integrated into products like bags and solar powered clothing.

The Powerbrella™ is expected to be available for purchase by the third quarter of 2009.

Looking forward to long days with lot of sunshine made me check out what’s up in the research kitchen regarding wearable solar technology, speak flexible and hopefully lower cost solar panels.

My most promising find: Konarka, one of the hot favorites in the field of wearable solar power working on Power Plastic® that converts light to energy. This simple yet powerful mission of Konarka moved them to the forefront not only in research and development but very close to actual manufacturing of the first Power Plastic® materials.

The advantages of Power Plastic® will be: inexpensive, lightweight and flexible – just the stuff needed to be build power into Wearable Electronic products enabling them to have their own low cost embedded sources of renewable energy.

In a recent press release Konarka announced a first-ever demonstration of Inkjet Printed Solar Cells.

‘Demonstrating the use of Inkjet printing technology as a fabrication tool for highly efficient solar cells and sensors with small area requirements is a major milestone,’ commented Rick Hess, president and CEO at Konarka.

How does it work? Inkjet printing is a commonly used technique for controlled deposition of solutions of functional materials in specific locations on a substrate and can provide easy and fast deposition of polymer films over a large area. That’s scientist language explaining the function of an good old Inkjet printer I am sure most of our reader know and have connected to the computer.

This demonstration from Konarka confirms that organic solar cells can be processed with printing technologies with little or no loss compared to ‘clean room’ semiconductor technologies such as spin coating.

The advantage of this solar cell printing technology is the simpler and cheaper manufacturing setup required and the possibility to print solar cells on different materials like plastic and potentially on fabrics.

It is not expected to create high power solar cells in this way but powerful enough to collect light supplying products like sensors that have lower power requirements.

When will Power Plastic® become available for use? No clear signal yet out of Konarka but this will also depend on how ‘hot’ the interest from the market will be to use the Power Plastic® in commercial products.

If the solar bag trend that started last year continuous or becomes even hotter = bigger this year, Power Plastic® might be put on the fast track to commercialization.

Wherever there is light there will be (soon) power in your clothing and bags.

Researchers at INL (Idaho National Laboratory), along with partners at Microcontinuum Inc. (Cambridge, MA) and Patrick Pinhero from the University of Missouri, are developing a way to collect energy from the sun with a technology that could potentially cost pennies a yard, be imprinted on flexible materials and still draw energy after the sun has set.

That’s a long and bold statement but how could this become reality?

Tiny nano-antenna array capable of collecting power by pick up infrared radiation not only from the sun when it radiates down during the day but also from the Earth when it radiates back up after dark.

The best performing solar cells today usually transform less that 40% of the usable energy into electricity. Flexible solar cells have half of this efficiency.

INL’s discovery could push this efficiency up to 80 percent if they can transfer this idea into mass-production.

Another advantage of this new technology is the cost: commercial solar cells are made of silicon and doped with exotic elements to boost its efficiency. The supply of processed silicon is lagging and they only get more expensive as demand increases.

The new approach uses a special manufacturing process to stamp tiny square spirals of conducting metal onto a sheet of plastic. This process makes it potentially cheaper and mass produceable on a roll to roll basis.

INL’s discovery could push this efficiency up to 80 percent if they can transfer this idea into mass-production.

As the well informed reader of talk2myShirt knows, Solar Fashion is becoming the next big thing in fashion and having a continuos power supply for Smart clothing will make them run day and night.

A brilliant, out of this world technology that will one day make our power T-Shirt work – day and night

source: INL

The Textile International Forum and Exhibition we posted about a few days ago introduced another revolutionary textile technology: the Solar Textile after showing us the Textile Oven.

The Solar Power Textile is foldable and more suitable for integration into clothing than flexible solar panels used at the moment in many bags.

Having the softness of textiles, the use of such Solar Textiles do not pose any wear limitation for clothing.

Mr. Lin Cheng-chu, vice-director of the Weaving Research Department at the Taiwan Textile Research Institute (TTRI) explained: “In the near future, bags or jackets made with solar textiles will provide electricity for PDAs, cellphones or digital media players.”

Another revolutionary e-textile that comes out of the kitchen of TTRI is a foldable capacitor with similar properties in terms of integration into clothing as the solar textile. If this foldable capacitor becomes available on the market, it will have a big impact on Wearable Electronic products. Having a power storage that behaves almost like textile will transform clothing into power storing batteries.

I do not expect the storage capacity will run a laptop anytime soon but for small devices, especially bio-sensors for heart rate or similar functions might be within reach soon.

According to Mr. Lin, the solar textile technology will probably materialize in as early as one to two years.

Combine foldable solar textiles and foldable power storage textiles and we get a nice, self contained textile power house invisible integrated into our clothing to run all our gadgets forever.

[source: The China Post]

Solar power is taking over the battle field after being one of the hottest items in all kind of bags this year.

The Australian army is testing new solar cell technology made from a secret compound and can produce hours of low-level energy to power radios, night-vision goggles, communications equipment and sensors to detect enemy positions.

The new panel weights just 14oz, and works even in cloudy conditions because it harnesses solar radiation rather than direct sunlight.

The Australian military spent around 2 million US$ on this project with the aim to find a better solution to power all the high-tech equipment the soldiers of our time have to carry around on the battle field.

As with many new technologies, the military is often on the forefront of research and first applications, mainly because of the fast amount of resources and money available in the military sector.

The good point is that most of those new developments will trickle down to civilian use and I can only hope the new secret solar compound will make its way to solar fashion for the 2008 season – yeah, I am a big optimist but one can have his/her dreams, right?!

[via: SciFi Tech]

During my regular scan of companies we have posted about in the past, I discovered an update on Noon Solar’s website. Actually, their Website is under construction but it shows a new layout (image on the right cut out of their new site) and most important, the announcement that the new Solar Bag collection will be in store on November 15.

We marked this day in our calendar and look forward to see what Marianne Fairbanks and Jane Palmer, the founders of Noon Solar, have build up over the last few month since we posted about Noon Solar.

What makes Noon Solar different to most other companies is the throughly ecological pureness that both ladies have as their leading motivation to create a range of solar bags.

Besides the solar panels, which are laminated onto fabric and sewn into the bags, Noon Solar uses only biodegradable materials like leather tanned with vegetable-based substances rather than heavy metals that cause pollution, and natural-dyed fabrics, all stitched together by a Costa Rican factory that abides by fair labor practices.

There are various companies worldwide who make solar-powered bags, but Marianne Fairbanks and Jane Palmer believe their level of environmental and humanitarian commitment sets them apart from the competition.

Noon Solar had their first product on the market last fall by offering 50 satchel-style bags designed for men or women. They where sold primarily at two high-end boutiques in Chicago. The bags, which came in four shades of leather retailed for $400 to $700 and sold out quickly.

After the initial success, the team spent the next twelve month to design their second collection for fall 2007 — six shoulder and messenger bags in a variety of colors of leather and fabric.

But Marianne Fairbanks and Jane Palmer have already started thinking about the 2008 bag collection where they want to add magnets that allow people to buy a couple of bags and move the solar panel from one to another – an excellent idea to reuse the solar panel on different bags.

According an article by Crain Communications Inc., the founders of Noon Solar would love to see copycat, eco-friendly solar designers emerging that fit more people’s price range.

“We want to start the trend,” Ms. Fairbanks says. “We want to make it exciting so it can trickle down and become the thing that’s sold at Target for $20.”

This statement is very close to our ‘mission’ on talk2myShirt: we love to help people and companies to come together, sharing ideas and have interaction to make Wearable Electronic a thing for ‘everyday – everyone – everywhere’ a useful, practical and hot looking product.

Hobby photographer and professionals alike have next to their power hungry cameras plenty of other gear in their camera bags for making the perfect shot to get famous.

Eclipse Solar Gear has a new camera bag that gives power to the Shutterbugs among our readers, the Ion Camera/Video Gear Bag.

Next to the Ion Camera/Video Gear Bag, Eclipse Solar Gear has a large range of solar power bags spanning Backpacks, Messenger Bags, Camera Bags and Bike Bags. All of them are ready to collect the sun light and convert it for the power hungry gadgets in our bags.

The Ion Camera/Video Gear Bag looks very good and has all the features a photographer expects from such a bag: Made of durable 1680 Denier Nylon, the large main cavity can handle a digital camcorder and a digital SLR camera with room left for accessories. It has internal dividers adjustable to fit snugly around any camera model. Side pockets with internal webbing help organizing memory cards, batteries, or other equipment.

What makes the Ion Camera/Video Gear Bag different to ‘normal’ camera bags is the integrated flexible solar panel on the top cover that provides power to trickle charge rechargeable batteries, camera batteries, or other electronic device like cellphone, MP3 player, …

The solar charging solution can be utilized by using the common 12V automotive adapter made for your device. No other special adapters are needed.

With the Ion Camera/Video Gear Bag you can recharge your camera while racing from one photo shot to another and have not to worry about running out of power while having all the celebrities lining up in front of your camera lens.

Amazing is the cost of the Ion Camera/Video Gear Bag, just $ 84.99 by RitzCamera.com. This price makes the Ion Camera/Video Gear Bag the cheapest solar power bag I have seen so far.