DIY Emergency Pocket Power Bank

I have made a survival, emergency pocket power bank. As we are now so much surrounded by our gadgets especially cell phones all requiring power on the go. Often we land up into the situation wherein we need to make that one call or reach out to someone or in a situation of panic or distress this pocketable power bank comes in handy. It is made just to charge your dead mobile phone to about 7 to 8 % so that you can make that urgent emergency contact or a call in such kind of situation. This power bank then discharges after that life saving 7 to 8% of charge to your cell phone. It can then be recharged once again for that kind of situations or emergency situation. There are just a handful of components required to make one on your own.

I made a body of this power bank form pieces of acrylic. Sadly though I do not have access to the 3d printer yet else I could have printed the enclosure. I measured the components and cut a few pieces of acrylic form an old registration plate of a car. Then I superglued all together making sure that the sides are perfect right angles else it won't hold together for long and would look ugly too.

We will need just three main components. 1S lipo battery that is typical of RC hobby drone. You can easily get hold of one of them to form an RC hobby store. One I am using here is of capacity 400 mA. A most important component that you will need is a 1S power bank module that supports charging of connected 1S battery via micro USB port on board and it has full-fledged USB port wherein we will connect our dead mobile phone to charge it with any available USB cable. I am going to keep one short length USB cable always connected as in panic or emergency situation it should be handy and one should not feel helpless, that though having a power bank in your pocket you couldn't make that call as there was no USB cable to charge your phone. We will also require some miscellaneous wire to wire it up and a slider switch to power on and off our power bank.

Soldering electronics in this project was like a child's play. I have connected switch a battery and power bank module as shown in the picture, that completes this step.

I made a slot for the charge in-out ports as shown in the picture above in one of the side plates of acrylic and hot glued power bank module in place. In the other plate, I made a slot for sliding switch and hot glued it in place. Then I placed the battery and arranged the wires and super glued all together. You can see the completed unit in one of the pictures.

I got my hands on to the leopard skin pattern self-adhesive wrap. This is just not by coincidence it's symbolic. Just like panther runs so fast for a short distance and then gets exhausted in the same way this power bank will just boost your phone for that life-saving call and it will then get exhausted ha ha ha I think my analogy was a bit too weird. But I wrapped so that it looks good and then I carefully cut out the openings for the ports and switch in the wrapped power bank. Now it's time to test.

As shown in the pictures this power bank is truly compact and portable and you can easily place it in your pocket or in your backpack while going hiking or some adventure trip. This will easily fit into any of your trouser regular pockets. Finally, I have shown that it functions well as expected and the phone I am holding is getting charged easily by power bank. I have tested it and I found that form total discharge state of say about (4000 mAh capacity of phone battery) it can boost your phone up to about 7 to 8% with this 400 mAh battery (used in power bank) and that is what the purpose of this power bank is all about. I hope that many of you would find this project useful. Thank you all for your time and do not forget to give this instructable a heart It will be a great motivation for me.