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“YX8018 is a 4-pin integrated circuit for driving solar powered garden LED lights and is found on many cheap garden lights. You can buy 10x YX8018 ICs on AliExpress for around $1. You will need the following parts to build …
Content for YX8018
The YX8018 is more or less just a gated oscillator which runs at approximately 200 KHz driving an open drain NMOS switch ( output on pin1 ). The circuit pulses the small inductor to step up the voltage to drive the LED in a similar way as a Joule Thief circuit. The use of a single AAA NiCd rechargeable cell keeps the cost down. Which also means the solar panel can be a cheaper low voltage version. The 3 cm x 3 cm one from this example generated 2.7 volts in full sunlight with a short circuit current of 17 mA.