When you want to use your smartphone for an extended period of time in an area where electricity is very scarce, you either bring with you enough batteries to get your phone through the trip, or you bring a charger that can harvest energy from the environment. Here is a project for a solar mobile phone charger to be mounted on top of your backpack or in some other convenient location. It works; the designer tried it out in the desert and survived to tell us about it.

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