Looks like the Renology 30-watt solar panel/charger might be a good fit at $51.
And this panel comes with a charge controller that provides USB ports as well for $45.
For a general idea of how to wire these things up:
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That’s a great find on that solar kit, thanks for the link! It was funny, though, looking at the pictures when I saw that their skills at proofing the English translation was a major fail.
Why not use a solenoid to lift the latch? I am not sure how much current one will draw.
I didn’t know if solenoids would provide the range of movement desired. But tonight, I found there are 12VDC miniature linear actuators that definitely would.
True, perhaps @CO_4X4 could tell us how far he needs to move that lock thing.
Solenoids probably do draw too much current though, unless you can engineer it to only be on for a very short time.
On the picture I posted earlier in this thread, you can see that the latch mechanism is a lightweight “quarter moon” motion, this is to say that since it’s not a straight shot up and down or side to side, I don’t know that a linear actuator or a solenoid would work well for that. My thought was to take a servo with two small arms that go over the top and bottom of that latch to raise and lower it through it’s quarter moon motion (even just a screw above and below that lever into the servo but act as stops to catch the lever). The actual movement would be approximately 4 inches (give or take).
The actuator might work if I 3D print some type of arm and hinge to transfer the straight up/down motion to the curved motion needed, I suppose it would be similar - but it seems like it would be a lot of power consumption versus those small lightweight Arduino kit type motors (that are probably built for < $1).