I’ve mentioned before the importance of having the MintyBoost available during a major power outage last October in New England. This allowed me to have my toys working. But since the outage extended for a long time it was obvious I was going to go through a lot of batteries. Thus, the need to upgrade to the solar version.
Attached is a photo of my finished upgrade. It is quite a neat installation. I love it. Thanks Lady Ada.
Just letting you guys know that I bought the MintyBoost v3, and that it charges my Motorola Droid X. I bought 3 kits, one for me, and two for my friends who own a Samsung phone, and a BlackBerry phone. I’ll let you guys know if their devices charge, if they’re not already on the compatibility list, once they get around to assembling theirs. I want to thank Adafruit Industries for providing such a great and useful kit with very easy and clear instructions. Keep making more kits so I can keep buying them. Thanks, A Very Satisfied Customer
Celebrated Christmas early this year – this is what my mom made me. Pretty bad ass, my phone dies all the time and I rarely have my charger with me. (imgur.com)
That’s our MintyBoost kit and best of all, we’re starting to see the celebration of making things get out to more and more places. Thanks Nick!
Hey guys, we’re looking at sending one of your mintyboost kits to space. Well, 100,000 anyway. We’re going to launch a weather balloon with some electronics aboard. We’re considering using the mintyboost to ensure the batteries don’t run out before recovery. But weight’s an issue. Can you tell me what the weight of the mintyboost is?
Does the MintyBoost work with the iPod 4S and iOS 5? YES! Every time there is a new OS or phone we make sure to test right away, we’re pleased to report the MintyBoost is happily charging our iOS 5 phones and the new iPhone 4S.
I finally stopped playing around with all the parts (monitoring setup above) and wrapped up the 6V 3.7W panel, Minty, and solar lipo charger in a nice fluorescent blue acrylic housing. Along with a 6600 mAh battery, I can now charge the heck out of USB powered gadgets. See http://www.ransomhall.com/Pages/solbooster.aspx for more details of this build. I am going to create an Instructable for this and enter it in the Epilog laser cutter contest. I’ll post links when that is ready.
Thanks to this nice tutorial http://ladyada.net/make/solarlogger/ I’ve done a substantial upgrade! Now I can monitor and save the following data:
Voltage: Panel, Battery, Load
Current: Panel and soon battery (waiting on parts)
Temperature: battery, in case it gets too hot.
We have a lot of new folks to electronics making kits now, it’s great! – and with that there are a lot of tips, hints and check lists we are working on to better assist with questions in the customer support forums. Here’s one for the MintyBoost. The MintyBoost can power so many devices, used with so many batteries, cables, etc, etc in so many configurations we have a handy check list to help you when you need help making this kit! It’s a mini-FAQ our support team put together. Enjoy! Before you post about a MintyBoost issue… Read this!
A few folks (including us) have iPhone 3Gs units that sometimes say ‘Charging is not supported with this accessory’ - it appears to be a wonky dock connector… jsappo writes -
You’ve probably heard of those power bands that are supposed to boost your energy and balance …or something. You know, the ones that magically work really really well in every country except the ones with decent advertising regulations? Yeah, those. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could have a power band that, y’know, actually did something? Like, say, recharge USB devices? Yep, that’s right. It’s time again for “Build Something Weird With Steve”…
Last night members of the Hong Kong Hackerspace, aka Hong Kong Hackjam, got together at the Boot.HK offices to undertake a quick project to help victims of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. With electricity out in many parts of Japan, the call went out from the Tokyo Hackerspace community asking for help in providing lighting, networking and other electronic supplies for victims of the disaster.
Here in Hong Kong we settled on the quick and easy (somewhat) task of building “Minty Boosts“. These are battery powered USB chargers that can be used with any AA battery to charge a mobile phone or other electronic device. The entire hardware is soldered together and throw into a candy or mint box, thus the name “Minty Boost”.
Over a dozen hackers and technology enthusiasts gathered last night to throw together some relief supplies that will be sent to Tokyo in the next day or two. Only a couple of the devices (mine included) ended up FUBAR, as is to be expected as some of us were not that experienced with a soldering iron. But many others were thrown together by are more hack-savvy members and were charging phones by the end of the night with great success.
Awesome to see hackers helping hackers (helping everyone). Hong Kong Hackjam, you guys rock!
NEW PRODUCT – Altoids Gum sized tin! Ever since Altoids discontinued the Gum version, its been hard to get tins. So we went and got a whole mess of them custom made! These tins are exactly the same shape and size as the old Altoids gum tins but they are blank and we got the bottom flattened instead of rounded (so it fits things better)
Outside dimensions are: 1.43″ x 3.35″ x 0.8″ Inside dimensions are: 1.40″ x 3.30″
Perfect for mintyboosts! Contains no gum (which is probably for the best as it was kind of gross tasting).
Printable catalog (PDF)
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