Check out this awesome waterproof MintyBoost enclosure project built by Adafruit community member “IthinkIunderstand” on the Adafruit Forums!
Just thought i would share my first MintyBoost kit. I do a lot of biking and hiking and wanted something a little more rugged than the standard metal case. So i dug out the plumbing fittings and made a nice little waterproof version. Of course, we always realize a better way to build something AFTER we’ve built the first one. If i were to do this again, i would have a cable directly soldered to the board and coming out of a waterproof grommet somewhere on the cylinder. I would leave enough of the cable inside so that changing the batteries would simply mean unscrewing the cap and sliding out the unit, batteries first, and switching out the double A’s. That way you could just plug it in without opening it up.
This thing is made with 1 1/2 inch plumbing pieces which is common in any hardware store. The pictures are deceiving, but the length is roughly 135mm or 5 1/4 inches. If i had changed the size of the Lexan the batteries and board are sitting on i might have been able to add a set of spare batteries inside as a backup. This thing could be made to fit inside a 1 1/4inch pipe also, but it would be tight.
Another version of this would be to put it inside a plastic case for outdoor electrical. There would be room for a lipo battery and the charging circuit, including something solar. Look in the section where they keep all that gray plastic electrical conduit stuff.
The crew over at MakerBot shared some more designs for the three DIY electronics kits we included in the MakerBot Adafruit Edition, and we have been having fun printing these out in-house ourselves!
A few days ago we and our good friends over at Adafruit announced a limited Adafruit edition of the MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer available for sale. The whole batch sold out in 33 hours.
As others have pointed out, this makes total sense. Adafruit customers are total DIY heroes who would naturally want to make their own customized enclosures and components. You know what’s perfect for doing that? A MakerBot.
Right now you can pick up three of Adafruit’s most popular kits at the MakerBot Store in NYC: TIMESQUARE, RasPi, and MintyBoost. To sweeten the deal, we’ve launched our own special designs for the enclosures for these three kits, seen in the photo above, on our own Thingiverse page.
Boost converters (or step-up converters) are in a class of circuits called DC-DC conversion circuits. These can operate more efficiently than linear regulators like the 7805, and unlike linears they can be designed to have a higher output voltage than their input voltage – potentially useful for low-voltage sources like some steppers.
Bruce Mueller needed to be off the grid for a couple of weeks this summer at the Boy Scout National Jamboree, so he converted his D-battery MagLight into a super long charging Minty Boost monster!
He shared this story about creating this project:
While cellular coverage will be good (thanks AT&T!), charging a phone will be a challenge. I was looking for a way to provide a sturdy recharging solution. After studying your battery cell information page, it became clear that a solution with 3 D cells and Mintyboost would fit the bill..
But, alas, this won’t fit in altoids tin! — Then I saw my lonely 3D Maglite flashlight. With the advent of LED torches, I don’t think I’ll ever use it as a lightsaber again, but it would make an excellent home for a mintyboost.
After taking the bulb out, breaking it and soldering in wires to power the mintyboost, all that remained was coming up with a way to hold it in the flashlight…
Fortunately, I’m the new proud owner of a Makerbot Rep2… In the attached link is my thingiverse design of a holder for the Mintyboost to put it into the head of the Maglite flashlight. It is a beautiful thing, and will keep me connected for at least a week!
And here is an excerpt of his Thingiverse from Thing 52218 description:
This bracket holds a Mintyboost from Adafruit in place of the bulb assembly in a 3-D cell Maglite Flashlight.
The Mintyboost from Adafruit is an excellent battery powered USB charger circuit. It was designed to use 2 AA cells and be housed in a mini altoid tin container. I was looking for significantly higher capacity and a rugged housing, and stumbled over my 3D cell aluminum Maglite. Removing the bulb and reflector, I created a space to hold the mintyboost board. By disassembling (breaking) a bulb, power can be drawn from the bulb socket.
MintyBoost Kit – v3.0: Make your own iPod/iPhone/GPS/etc… battery-pack and recharger! This project includes all the electronic parts necessary to build your own MintyBoost: a small & simple (but very powerful) USB charger for your iPod (or other mp3 player), camera, cell phone, and any other gadget you can plug into a USB port to charge. If you have a Nintendo DS/GBA or a PSP you can buy charger cables from us, too. The charger circuitry and 2 AA batteries fit into an small space such as an Altoids gum or mint tin, and will run your iPod for hours, 2.5x more than you’d get from a 9V USB charger! You can use rechargeable batteries too. (read more)
Heres’s an enthusiastic write up by David Bark from FromTheTrails.com about the Adafruit Minty Boost kit as a tool for hikers — and he made some interesting observations:
I did some testing to see how much of a charge I could get out a set of batteries and here are my results below:
Normal Duracell Batteries (1150 mAH capacity): 20 % charge 40 min duration
They do make higher capacity AA batteries, so you could improve on the performance.
What I found is that the normal Duracell Batteries got extremely hot while they charge my phone, while the eneloop batteries got warm but were ok to touch.
With the unit 1.2 oz & (2) AA batteries 1.8 oz. the entire unit only weighs in at 3 oz.!! With an extra set of batteries still brings you in under 5 oz. So far this is the lightest weight option that I have found available. In addition, using rechargeable batteries that can be recharged up to 1500 times, saves money on batteries. You could put a charger in your bounce box if you really wanted to, but I’m thinking the rechargeables might be a better option for section hiking.
MintyBoost Kit – v3.0: Make your own iPod/iPhone/GPS/etc… battery-pack and recharger! This project includes all the electronic parts necessary to build your own MintyBoost: a small & simple (but very powerful) USB charger for your iPod (or other mp3 player), camera, cell phone, and any other gadget you can plug into a USB port to charge. If you have a Nintendo DS/GBA or a PSP you can buy charger cables from us, too. The charger circuitry and 2 AA batteries fit into an small space such as an Altoids gum or mint tin, and will run your iPod for hours, 2.5x more than you’d get from a 9V USB charger! You can use rechargeable batteries too. (read more)
October is one of my favorite months and it has been quite a memorable one so far. I have taken a brief breather from developing my delta army and engaged in a playful dialogue with a fellow techie at our local Hacker space here in town. He has an impressive collection of self-made steam punk inspired goggles, of which he is currently underway with his fourth pair. In response to this stellar practice, I have created my own version… a retro leather-trimmed set that has some nifty chain-switch activated light pipe around the lenses to give the illusion of neon.
MintyBoost Kit – v3.0 – The world’s first and only open-source hardware charger: The MintyBoost! Make your own iPod/iPhone/GPS/etc… battery-pack and recharger! This project includes all the electronic parts necessary to build your own MintyBoost: a small & simple (but very powerful) USB charger for your iPod (or other mp3 player), camera, cell phone, and any other gadget you can plug into a USB port to charge. If you have a Nintendo DS/GBA or a PSP you can buy charger cables from us, too.
The charger circuitry and 2 AA batteries fit into an small space such as an Altoids gum or mint tin, and will run your iPod for hours, 2.5x more than you’d get from a 9V USB charger! You can use rechargeable batteries too.
Power is out all over the coast in Brooklyn, including at my house near the Gowanus Canal (picture above from Monday night outside my building, taken by my neighbor). Don’t worry, I have friends with power nearby and my neighborhood is no longer flooded, but there are plenty of reasons I’d like to be hanging around my own home– the fridge’s food needs cooking, the pets, the projects, the neighbors and repair folks, etc.
So here’s what we did to power the devices I need to continue writing to you folks!
On hand I had a solar lipoly Minty Boost, which worked well for a while when the sun was out. Made from:
To charge my laptop, 4G hotspot, phone, and light up the room all at once I’m using a deep cycle battery and power inverter. I’m trying not to blast my Hulu so loud that it makes my neighbors jealous– by our estimates this rig should be powered for 40-60 hours, after which I can just swap it for another charged battery from down the street.
This old USGI flashlight gets a new lease on life by using its batteries to charge up my phone. I modified the tail cap to fit an Adafruit MintyBoost circuit in. It still functions as a flashlight, too. It might be useful for camping trips and emergencies, but mostly I did it because it’s cool.
Want to be featured on Flickr pool Friday? Add your Adafruits to the Adafruit Flickr pool.
I finally completed my project to use Adafruit Industries mintyboost with their li-poly solar-charger into one neat enclosure. I even built and designed a status circuit to fit the case easily activated with a button push.
USB / DC / Solar Lithium Ion/Polymer charger – v1.0. Make your projects to go green this summer with our specialized USB/Solar Lithium Ion Polymer Battery charger! This charger is a very unique design, perfect for outdoor projects, or DIY iPod chargers. We’ve spent over a year testing and tinkering with this charger to come up with a plug and play solution to charging batteries with the sun and we’re really pleased with what we ended up with.
Easy to use! Pick up any of our many 3.7V/4.2V LiIon batteries, and a 6V solar panel. Plug the battery into the BATT port using a 2-pin JST cable and the solar panel into the DC jack using a 2.1mm terminal block adapter. Put the solar panel outside (and keep the battery out of the sun, it needs to be kept shaded!) to start charging. You can power another project like a Mintyboost at the same time by connecting to the LOAD output port.
Jonathan Feldman talks about the future of Open Source Hardware in a commentary for Information Week.
Those of us with gray hair remember when mainstream companies viewed open source software with extreme skepticism–that is, until it became apparent that the Internet backbone was running reliably on OSS. Now attention is turning to open source hardware.
Open source hardware? Really?
Really.
If you’ve been following the Maker Movement, you’re already in the loop. Just as many open source iterations and eyes changed the face of software, so it will go with hardware. Want to build a USB battery charger out of a mint container and other widely available components? Limor Fried (aka Lady Ada) to the rescue, with her “minty boost” USB charger.
Surely this movement is for hobbyists only, right? You don’t want to fork out $50 for a USB battery charger, so you fork out $20 for the kit and work on it with your buddies over the weekend.
Well, there’s a larger world out there. Like open source software, open source hardware started among hobbyists and will make its way into the corporation.
Printable catalog (PDF)
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