The design of a solar powered consumer product, a case study

the SYN-ENERGY program aims to help the designer of solar powered consumer products through the development of data, tools and methods. This paper describes the development of a solar powered wireless computer mouse, which is carried out as a test case within the SYN-ENERGY project. The project is carried out with a “real” commercial environment in mind, and is used to integrate, test and validate existing knowledge and to identify knowledge gaps. The paper describes the analysis phase as well as the conceptual design phase, the latter with a special emphasis on the coupling between different design areas. Next to this, the final concept itself and an approach for the system level design of a category of products is presented. At the end of the paper, the available knowledge as well as the available PV-technology are discussed briefly, in the light of the presented approach.