Minty Boost: Portable USB power

A small battery-powered USB charger

Overview

This project details a small & simple, but very powerful USB charger for your mp3 player, camera, cell phone, and just about any other gadget you can plug into a USB port to charge! (See below for compatibility tests.)

The charger circuitry and 2 AA batteries fit into an Altoids gum tin, and will run your iPod for hours! 2.5x more than you'd get from a 9V USB charger! (See Process for math/calculations) You can use rechargable batteries too.

Specifications:
Some numbers...
  • iPhone (all types): 3/4 full recharge
  • iPod video (tested, using alkaline batteries): 3hrs more video (1 full recharge)
  • iPod mini (tested w/rechargables): 26 hours more (1.5 full recharges)
  • iPod nano: 4 full recharges!
  • iPod shuffle : 60 hours more , 5 full recharges!
This project is suitable for beginners, some soldering tools are necessary but even if you've never soldered before it should be pretty easy. You can etch a circuitboard and/or breadboard this up, or simply buy a kit from the webshop.

I've also documented the process of designing this kit, in case other people interested in designing and making kits are interested in learning how to start selling their own kits!
This project was developed under support from EYEBEAM, thanks!

This website and all original content therein is published under the Creative Commons 2.5 attribution license.

Reviews & Gallery

Read what some people have to say! (And let me know if you have a review you'd like linked to from here)

Device Compatibility

Hey we moved this really long list to the user manual, please go there to see compatibility charts for versions 2 and 3 of the mintyboost!

Mintyboost® is a registered trademark of Adafruit Industries

This guide was first published on Jun 11, 2013. It was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

This page (Overview) was last updated on Mar 11, 2013.

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