For whatever reason, cell phone companies really don’t seem to care about giving you a good battery for your phone. Here’s a great hack if you happen to have a purse — turn it into an inductive charger! Manpurses count too, we’re not judging.
[Becky] from Adafruit came up with a great idea for this wearable hack. If your phone is sitting in your purse for long periods of time, why not charge it? It’s a pretty simple hack that makes use of a pair of inductive charging loops. One is hidden inside the bottom of your bag of choice, and the other mounted to a fixture at work or home. She’s using magnets to snap her purse into place on a shelf at work — this ensures the coils line up so the full rated charge can be transmitted.
Another option is to put the entire inductive charging circuit inside your purse, then use a battery pack with a special pocket for you phone — that way the phone is always charging while it’s safely put away!
Stick around after the break to see the complete how-to video.
Want to take this hack up a notch? Why not cram the entire inductive circuit right into your phone?
Lifestyle hack: if you can live without checking facebook/twitter every 30 seconds and posting photos of everything you see/eat/do, you can have a normal cheap mobile phone with a battery that lasts weeks and that you won’t get mugged for.
+1
I just don’t understand why some people try to frame preferences different from theirs as some kind of personal failure.
Ok, you don’t like facebook or twitter, and don’t personally want a smart phone. Fantastic, have a cookie. So why are you reading this posting?? Were you expecting people to say “gee, I never thought of that” or do you just have to show off how meta-hip you are by rejecting the idea of hipness?
It’s probably because their life is a failure and this is all they have left is being a prick online belittling other peoples ideas and creations while they achieve nothing,
http://images.wikia.com/adventuretimewithfinnandjake/images/b/b3/Kevin-Butler-Mind-Blown.gifhttp://images.wikia.com/adventuretimewithfinnandjake/images/b/b3/Kevin-Butler-Mind-Blown.gif
Do you realize you’re doing the exact same thing?
Except I am doing it to make a point, not just be a random douche. If someone acts like a douche for no reason, I’ll give them what they deserve.
I’m pretty sure he’s doing the exact same thing; trying to prove a point. And you’re both hella demeaning :D
@Blue Footed Booby: “I just don’t understand why some people try to frame preferences different from theirs as some kind of personal failure.”
It’s actually quite natural to do so. Psychologists call it “in-group bias”. We all make the choices we think are best, and have a need to feel like we made a good choice. We have 3 options:
1) Other people’s choices are wrong.
2) Our choice was wrong.
3) There is no such thing as “right and wrong”
Adopting #3 forces you to adopt Nialism, and live a meaningless and purposeless life where none of the choices we make matter. Adopting 2 involves overturning part of your world view. If this upheaval is big enough, it can become a nervous breakdown.
It’s important to remember that we’re all just biomechanical clockwork. Getting pissed at a person is as absurd as yelling at the weather or at your car.
And ironicly that would mean leaving your phone in your purse/murse anyway.
And aren’t inductive chargers terribly inefficient anyway? I thought they were simply used as a means to “cut the cord”, but waste energy as a result. Plus you’d have to take DC, turn it into AC, back to DC and each step is yet another waste added to the overall system. Different than a switching boost supply because the coils of the magnetics involved would never be predicably close to each other this being a purse and all.
The article isn’t clear, but I assume the coil connects to a micro USB cable and you still have to plug in the phone in the bag to enable charging without having to plug the phone in. Not that much point really.
I liked the idea of turning the entire bag into an inductive charger rather than just the induction pickup, though that may be overly complicated and not very efficient
I like the idea but it doesn’t really seem to be that much of an advantage to be worth the effort (essentially, it’s only adding inductive charging to your phone – but with added bulk).
I thought the hack was smarter than that…
I had invisaged a bag with a battery and inductive loop to allow charging of a phone (assuming it has an inductive charging hookup which phones are increasingly getting). The bag then has a second inductive loop that can allow the battery to be recharged.
That way, when the phone is in the bag (when walking from home to “the shops”) and the phone is not in use, it is kept topped up until there is the need to update ones facebook status (“Living the consumerist dream. LOL”). When at home/work, the phone can be at your side while the bag is hanging-up(?) and be recharging the battery in the bag.
Oh, and rather than bag, also think: coat.
Same, I was surprised after seeing the way they did it and fairly disappointed.
Oh, it didn’t turn out as good as the one you built? Let’s see your build log. Oh….
well Alan never builds anything at all, so his childish call outs become even funnier.
This is indeed a cool hack, but Everpurse has been doing this as a polished consumer product for about a year now. Funded on kickstarter even.
You could just buy a external battery pack on Deal Extreme, and put inside the bag. Wire it to the charger, so you really have a phone charging purse.
What they don’t tell you is that this particular cheap wireless power supply produces A LOT of heat.
I tried to use one to make a charger for my phone, and the result was almost HaD-fail worthy.
The actually tell. But not explicitly…
“Because its an air-core transformer, it’s fairly inefficient. Only about 40% of the energy in shows up on the other end […]”
Can you provide more informations about this? I have wo of those modules as well and want to use them on a robot to charge itself autonomously. What were the problems? Heat you say?
The problem was that I wanted to integrate the receiver with the phone case, so I had to put it on the back, close to the battery.
As a result, my charging station would heat up the battery to dangerous levels.
On a robot you have more options for placing the coil, so you should be safe.
Remember that the transmitter coil consumes something like 100mA even when not loaded.
Thank you for that. This will give me headstart.
Mine nearly started a fire it melted the case to my device so I put an aluminum heat shield under the charging coil and it was so hot I could barely touch it while the device was charging, disappointing that adafruit would even sell some shit like this.
I’m sure all of the site editors here are going to run out and upgrade their purses now.
(Ahem!) purse^H^H^H^H^H “European Shoulder Bag”
You know, there’s a pre-assembled way to add wireless charging to an iPhone 5, 5s or 5c if you’ve got one – on Indiegogo a new product called iQi Mobile has launched and looking for investment. If you invest quickly you get to save money on the retail price too…
Basically it’s this really thin device (thinner than a credit card) you can plug into the lightning connector and then fold behind your iPhone. Finally you stick on a case – it even works with almost any soft case!
http://j.mp/iQiMobile
After bothering to actually read, It seems there is no battery in the purse/murse, this is just a way of setting your purse/murse down without having to take your phone out and plug it in, or run the cord into you bag, and more importantly, remember to unplug it before picking your bag up and walking away. I guess I’ll give credit for that. you could always design your own magnetic connector (risk getting a C and D from apple) and do it the physical contact way as well… But you always have to put your bag in the same spot every time either way. I’m thinking this idea with a tesla coil the way the man himself and envisioned (only smaller scale) would win ultimate geek cred.
actually I’ve done this a few months ago to my notebook backpack. meh, all you need is a qi charger and a power source. super easy and convenient.
btw I also added a solar panel to charge the battery bank connected to the qr charger via usb. really easy to do.