Dave Kruschke

MAYBE, you could take several separate joule thief circuits, each with an added output diode and connect the diodes to a common point for power output. The voltage wouldn't increase here but the current might, hence an increase in power out. I have never tried to increase power out so all I'm offering here is just talk....

If you send a reply here with your email address, I MIGHT be able to help you...

If you send me a separate "patch message," I MIGHT be able to help you...

Sorry, tilak1I know nothing about the different readers. When I bought my reader, I thought that I only had a choice of just one.I would have gladly picked the cheaper device, had I known better.

Without the capacitor present to resonate with the coil at 125 kilohertz, the energy picked up would be shorted out and not passed to the LED. Small transistor radios work the same way - they have a coil AND a capacitor. Using math, I tried to match the needed capacitance for the coil that I had wound. After it worked, I adjusted the capacitance a bit by trial and error and got the LED to light up brighter.Increasing the range would require different/better hardware. I THINK that chips having much longer range operate at a much higher frequency - short wave and also UHF.The hardware I purchased came with a RFID chip. This hardware get connected to a Windows PC that can read the number sent from the hardware to the PC after reading the RFID chip.Hope this helps a little...

mguima has a point. One can use the LED leads themselves as sort of a platform for the ic. The regular sized ic is shown used here but a SOT SMT device has also been used by another person, using very careful soldering...

The suggestion by tkennaugh below looks pretty solid, although I haven't tried it. You could connect a 1 to 10 k ohm potentiometer across two 1.5 volt batteries hooked up in series. Then connect the pot adjustable wiper lead to the solar cell input with the negative of the batteries going to the negative of the IC. Of course, remove the solar cell. Using a multimeter, you could adjust the voltage going to the IC and see what voltage causes the LED to light up, just what tkennaugh is talking about below. Wiring the solar cells in parallel may be just what you need to do...