DIY Battery Pack For Ingress!

Over at adafruit industries you can find this little circuit kit to charge up whatever device you would like for a mere $19.50 (you have to supply the case which can be almost anything!).

The device is called a "Minty Boost" after the tin is was initially designed around, a Altoids Mint Gum tin no bigger than the circuit and two AA batteries.  With this you get  582mAh!  You can also find mods to allow for a solar powered lipo battery version!

Rather than spend $40 for a largish, albeit sleek battery pack that does last 10000mAh, you can pick up this kit and tailor it to your whims.  As you can see I currently have normal duracell batt's in it, which I needed to use up.  For all my camera equipment I typically use these and plan to swap them out as soon as the duracell's wear out:

These are 2000-2500 mAh (depends on where you get them but I look for the 2350mAh ones)  I made a quick battery bandoleer and can fit on 3 more charges! Woot!


Initially I was going to use this kit in a dental floss container for super steath and a couple of AAA but the case was just too small.  

I then switched to this altoids tin and was still using a 3 AAA holder with spares stored on the sides of the battery holder, but that didn't seem to give the same bang for the buck, so to speak. 

I ended up with this current configuration though I'm thinking of using a three AA holder in place of the two AA holder.  

Right now you can see the blue tack putty in the bottom holding the batteries in and somewhat insulating the wires from the bottom of the tin.

This is great for the ingress game from google. This kit offers up the viability of long sessions and the ability to customize or "hide" it to your liking for prying enemy eyes!    

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Video : Unique Interfaces For Electronic Devices Using Magnets!

I came across this video by Andrea Bianchi and Ian Oakley on the youtube channel alsoplantsfly.  The video below covers the idea of using real world objects with magnets in them and the magnetometers in most tablets and cell phone devices.  I'm always a sucker for magnets!

In the video Andrea goes about showing you that with some simple rare earth magnets you can create some pretty interesting interaction and interfaces to do practically anything.  Its looks very similar to how Microsoft's surface identifies items when placed upon it, except I believe in the surfaces examples its using RFID tags.

Where I see these types of interfaces being a real boon is in gaming of course! You could have a 10" tablet or larger device on top of or embedded into a table and use gaming tokens to play various board games or rpgs.  Just like with the RFID examples in the surface demos but you could also recognize them "off the board" (or more on the side) of the board as well!  Ideas are just flooding my brain right now where this could be useful.  Very cool. 



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