Priceless Accessories for Powering Your Mobile Gadgets
The Modern Lifestyle and its tons of surrounding electronics require in most cases an additional power in a way to adequate charging and extra-powering when you are at open, or just when it is necessary.
When you are hiking or climbing on a mountain or just walk through the forest, there isn’t available, e.g. the wall’s socket with your regular AC/DC charger to maintain a charge.
We are collecting a couple of useful devices and we are in a hurry to share them with you. We will be proud in case we help you in the selection of the right accessory compatible with your pocket, wearing or a smart mobile device.
Let us see the main divisions:
POWER BANKS:
What is it? We will try to make a compact description of the main ingredients used to form such kind of device.
“Power Bank” – Even by name, it is a device that stores and has extra energy available at all times to the user.
A Power Bank – PB main ingredients:
- Power Source
- Input/Charging PB Circuitry
- Output/Powering External Devices Circuitry
- Digital Battery Capacity Metering
- Slots/Headers
- Additional Functions
- Durable & Rugged Enclosure
Power Source
In most cases, PB manufacturers are using Lithium-Ionic or Lithium Polymer Rechargeable Batteries.
They both have a problem with internal resistance and work below Zero Degrees Celsius, also are very fragile around a point of maximal charging voltage. They are not flame and explosion free.
One different group, very special and very durable, a little bit expensive are the lithium ferrous-phosphate LiFePO4 Batteries, which don’t have any disadvantages. Even on shortcircuit with astonishing rates of current, they aren’t flammable at all and they are completely explosion-free devices! If you can choose, the choice of LiFePO4 kind batteries is the best one.
Commonly, the battery cell count is more than one. The battery cells are attached in parallel or serial in a way to maximize the useful battery pack capacity.
Now, we will describe the internal circuitry, which contains the Input/Charging and Output/Powering semi-circuitries.
Input/Charging PB Circuitry
Usually, the input circuitry consists of Internal Charger – Balancer, who converts an input voltage and makes possible the optimal charging of different battery cell configurations. There must have a few important protections, like:
- reverse polarity,
- over-voltage and
- cell’s high-temperature protection.
The value of the input Voltage sources stays in range, between 5 and 15 Volts. In general, this is done via the Universal USB-A 5V slot.
Charging of the Most powerful Batteries with a capacity of 10 – 50Ah will take a too long time using the regular USB-A port, with 0.5 or 1A output Current. So if you are using Quick Charge supporting device and charger with the Max QC, e.g. =2A, this is one good solution with charging time decreased to 1/4.
Many projects also have a direct 12V DC – input, for comfortably attaching, e.g. to your car accumulator battery.
Many Advanced Power Bank Projects are using Another Accelerating charge feature – there the charge is made multifunctional USB-C type input.
Output/Powering External Devices Circuitry
When we are talking about powering the mobile and portable smart devices, there are a few standard output options:
- USB Type-A with 0.5A, 1.0A and 2.1A Output
- USB Type-C with different Voltage and Current Charging options.
As a non-written rule, a small capacity /5000 – 10000mAh/ Power Banks has only USB-A type output slot.
More powerful power banks with a large capacity /10 – 50Ah/ can have few outputs:
- 5V/2A via USB-A, covering Qualcomm QC – Quick Charge Standard,
- DC 12V Output: with low-battery limiting and short-circuit protection,
- DC 19V Output: laptop-compatible DC output or even
- 120VAC / 230 VAC output.
SOLAR ENERGY CHARGERS:
These devices are using solar energy to perform the target device charging. The Solar Energy Chargers can also be divided into two sub-groups.
- Realtime chargers – They could charge only when the charger is exposed to direct sunlight, and couldn’t do anything at dark places. Solar cells are a kind size-inefficient and they have significant dimensions when we talk about efficient, e.g. smartphone charging.
- A combination between Solar-Cell Charger and Power Bank Battery pack. These devices are most efficient and useful, especially, where the sunlight is not enough or the sky is cloudy. In most cases, they are more compact than the first group – real-time chargers. So, the solar power in these charging devices is only as an emergency, slow-charging alterative. These chargers have an optimization process of using solar panels – named MPPT. The abbreviate means – Maximum Power Point Tracker – a kind of maximized DC/DC converter reaching 98+% conversion efficiency of Solar Panel Received Energy which stays between 14-22%)
Let us see the solar chargers examples on the market:
COMBINED BATTERY DEVICES:
Available into a Combined Battery Tools Device Charger feature occupies a large part of these devices at all. In this where can add all External Speakers, Boom Boxes, Jump Starter,
- External Speakers,
- Boom Boxes,
- Jump Starters,
etc. portable devices, sharing their own batteries power for additional devices charging.
Let us see the combined battery devices examples, available on the market:
WIRELESS CHARGERS:
Many of the most modern portable devices – smartphones and smartwatches have built-in wireless charging support.
So, you would like to charge them where and when you want, not using any wires.
This comfortable feature requires a high-powerful power bank with, e.g. QI or QC Support.
Let us see the Wireless Chargers examples, selling on the market:
Advice: When you stop charging you power bank battery, external speaker or portable device, don’t forget to stop or remove your ac/dc converter from AC-Line connected wall’s outlet. Even it consumes a little energy but just thinks – when the thousands or why not a million people do the same, the effect will be significant – in favor of reducing the pollutions in the atmosphere of the planet.
