Trochotron Industries

The repurposable  device featured here is a Digipower Solutions Jumpstart JS1-V3 emergency cell phone charger, which charges and provides power via a pair of male and female mini-A USB connectors.  The device is intended to provide additional capacity for phones equipped with a suitable connector.  The packaging claims that it will provide an hour of talk time for most cell phones, but did not list a mAh rating.  (What’s the standard for converting from mAh to hour of talk time?)  There may be other devices like it on the market; this one is particularly tiny and features a clear plastic case and an interesting bonus feature, a white LED which works as a flashlight when a button is pushed.  Internally visible are the lithium polymer battery and charging circuitry.

While I’m not really interested in using it for my cell phone, it seems particularly ideal for powering small projects.  In particular, it has the right connector for plugging into the various tiny USB microcontrollers I’ve been working with.  I’ve been using a larger lithium-ion battery with USB output, and even the wonderful MintyBoost Altoids-tin charger, but they’re much, much larger than the microcontroller boards themselves.  The JS1-V3 is perfectly sized for this application.

Whenever I get some new gadget, for some reason my first instinct is to open it up and try to figure out what’s in it and how it works.  One of the things I love about the internet is that you can find very nice pictures of the innards of most gadgets, saving the trouble (and risk) of opening the device just to see what’s inside.  Here are some pictures of the Jumpstart and its innards, for those similarly interested.  In one, I’ve removed the insulating tape from the LiPo battery to show the battery specs, which reveal that that the battery is a 220 mAh 3.7v 20×25x6.2mm Li-poly cell, manufactured by B&K battery.  The last photo shows the Jumpstart battery plugged into an AVRopendous2-DIP board, providing portable power for the board.