I built three separate circuits with the intention of making a colored led cycling solar sun jar.
Each circuit works on its own. With just the RGB ATtiny85 circuit it works with 3x 1.2 volt AA NiMH batteries. If I reduce the AA batteries to just one, 1.218 volts on its own, and put the output of the LT1073 step-up converter circuit to the RGB ATtiny85 circuit the LED lights up as expected. At this point I see 3.218 volts at the output of the LT1073. If I take the battery + and put it to the charging circuit's 2N3906 emitter then the led no longer works. A reading of the 2N3906 collector voltage shows 1.284 volts when disconnected from the LT1073 circuit. When I connect it to the LT1073 circuit it reads 0.6 volts and the output of the LT1073 reads 0.592.
These are the circuits of the project:
- RGB light cycling microcontroller circuit modeled very similarly to this project, but only using one common cathode RGB led.
- LT1703 based step-up converter using a single AA 1.2v NiMh battery. The circuit schematic comes from the LT datasheet on page 11, only changing R1 and R2 to acquire the output voltage of 3.2 volts.
- A simple solar cell charging circuit, see detecting darkness for the schematic.
I assembled the schematic for viewing this circuit by combining images of the three sources and modifying for existing conditions.
Note that the LT1073 circuit is constructed with carbon film resistors where the LT schematic calls for metal film and also I'm using electrolytic capacitors.
I'm puzzled how the introduction of the 2N3906 transistor has resulted in the circuit to fail.