PowerEver is a tiny electronic board that will keep your commercial power bank running non-stop while minimizing self-drained current. It is user-adjustable and is compatible with nearly all power banks in the market. This means that your power bank will never run short of mobile power for your electronic gadget.

Counter the Auto-shutdown

Modern off-the-shelf power banks are excellent, clean, galvanically isolated power sources that will often turn themselves off without enough load connected. To overcome this hurdle, PowerEver has been created allowing your favorite electronic boards and gadgets to run non-stop. PowerEver is designed to consume as little current as possible while passing most of it to your connected device. This current is freely adjustable using a single push button on the back side either to increase or decrease draw to suit to your power banks behavior.

Longer Power Bank Life

PowerEver lets you use your power bank until the end of its life, even when its no longer capable of charging your phone. There is still more than enough power for your Arduino application board on the go, or during programming/testing your microcontroller. All this without fear of power surge and noise from an AC adapter.

Features

• Use generic mobile phone power banks as a regular DC 5 V power supply for powering all kind of gadgets and electronic boards
• User-adjustable through button triggering to suit almost all power banks
• Designed to consume as little current as possible
• Small and light-weight enough to put into your wallet
• Fully open source with complete schematics and source code provided for immediate tweaking

Specifications

Microcontroller

• ATtiny13A running 1.2 MHz at 5 V

Power

• 5 VDC powered by any mobile power bank
• Adjustable total current drain from 110 mA down to 3 mA (16.5 mA as default)

Buttons and Connectors

• 1x USB Type-A male for connecting to a power bank
• 1x USB Type-A female output to user loads
• 1x push button

Status Display

• 1x blue LED for visual feedback

Dimensions and Weight

• 16 mm x 50 mm (~ .6 in x 2 in)
• 5.9 g (~ .21 oz)

Optional Accessories

• USB Type-A male to 5-pin screw terminal connector

Current Adjustment

Adjusting the current draw is done using the yellow button on the bottom, and works as follows:

• Short press: PowerEver will increase its current consumption by 1% (about 1 mA) and the blue on-board LED will blink 1 time to confirm.

• Long press: PowerEver will decrease its current consumption by 1% (about 1 mA) and the LED will blink 2 times to confirm.

• If the blue LED blinks 5 times it means the top or bottom maximum adjustable level has been reached.

• The last known state is saved in the MCU’s non-volatile memory when the board is disconnected.

• You can reset the level to the factory default (16.5 mA) by removing the power and then steadily pressing the button while reconnecting it to the power bank. The LED will blink 5 times to confirm the factory reset.

Open Source

GitHub: https://github.com/klui-freiberg/PowerEver/

There are new models of power banks produced everyday, and PowerEver may not be built to cope with all of them. To solve this, this project comes with resources for you to hack in connections. It is also MIT Licensed, one of the most respectful licenses in the world of open source.

Manufacturing Plan

We built our own pick & place machine with 2 vision cameras and servo strip feeding controlled by OpenPnP. The unit has been tested and is working properly. PCB designs, assembly, and testing will all be done in-house here in Nonthuri, Thailand. We order our PCBs and parts from the USA and China, choosing only reliable, ISO-certified companies for the sake of traceability and quality assurance.

Fulfillment & Logistics

We aim to deliver our products to Crowd Supply within 4 weeks after the end of the campaign. From there Crowd Supply will take 4-6 weeks to process and ship the boards to backers. This process ensures that the backers will receive the goods as soon as possible through their efficient logistics system. You can learn more about their fulfillment service in their guide page Ordering, Paying, Shipping: The Details.

Risks & Challenges

All product manufacturing carries risk. We have mitigated as much of this as we can, and taken into account the fact that shipping is less dependable during COVID-19 times. We have already secured most of the common discrete components, and semiconductor parts should get to us within a week using Mouser’s express courier. Should any delays occur in the process of manufacturing or distributing units, backers will be informed through project updates.