Solar Panel Bonsai Tree

This Solar Panel Bonsai Tree is designed to be both a statement piece and a working device. Inspired by traditional bonsai styling, the tree uses real solar panels arranged as leaves to collect energy and charge your phone using nothing but sunlight. It’s a striking demonstration of renewable energy in a compact, desk-friendly form.

Parts Required

29x 30mm Solar panels - Amazon

Solar Panel Manager - PiHut

14500  Lithium-ion battery - SolarCentre

USB Panel Mount - Amazon

4x M3 x 6mm Self-Tapping Screw - BambuLabs

Instructions

This design only has 4 parts. Tree trunk sections snap together to form tall tree trunks which you can feed the wires through.

- For the full size model you need to print 290x tree trunk sections (plus a few spare). - Print 29x 30mm Solar panel holders - Attach the solar panels to the holders using Hot Glue gun - Tree-Trunk sections snap together, create chains of them between 9-12 long. When attaching them to the soil plate you want the longest ones in the middle. Here's how I laid out all 290:

Electronics

To save you alot of time, you can buy an off-the-shelf solar power manager. The one I used in the parts list requires 6-24V solar panels. Since we're using 2V solar panels, we need to join several together in series. I joined them together in rows, so they are 5-7 in a row each, then all the rows are joined together in parrelel. This needs to be done after you've assembled them and on the back of the soil plate, like this:

Finally you need to connect the USB panel mount to the 5V output of the solar manager.

How much power does this produce?

Since you're probably looking for this answer before making a decision to build it, here's the answer:

5V output - 2.61W.

Yes, that is terrible. But because the solar panels charge the battery with the solar manager I've chosen it outputs a solid 5V, 5W output.

There is also a more powerful solar power manager which can output 15W Powerful Solar Panel Manager when combined with 3x 18650 batteries. Just leave it in the sun for the day and it'll charge your phone to full at night.