MeshPocket is a Meshtastic-compatible power bank that supports the Qi2 magnetic wireless charging protocol.
This is pre-sale, products will be shipped from April 25th. $10.00 off per-sale period.
I love it, except for the fact they explicitely state it's not waterproof. Given the backpacking and otherwise emergancy nature of one of the major selling points of meshtastic? that's a key feature that needs to be implimented.
You're....walking in the woods....And then suddenly you're....uh....flashbanged? And then you're in the back of your kidnapper's car with a convenient Heltec device to communicate with?
I honestly have no idea what the actual fuck happened in that marketing video.
For your second node, since you're gonna get a second node, get something with replaceable antenna. There's a huge difference in signal between the small stock antennae and something like this.
I ordered a 5,000 mAh to try out. It saves me from building something similar myself. Prototyping wireless charging is hard enough as it is without taking radio interference into account.
I would think it would weigh too much to actually stick it to a phone with a magnetic back. I think it's more for just setting the phone down on top of it and getting a charge from it.
Edit: Eh, 140g. That may be possible. Though having it stuck to your phone would end up making your phone over 300 grams and possibly over 400.
By chance, do the numbers seem a bit off to anybody else? From what I understand, the battery capacity is 5,000 or 10,000 mAh, but yet it's only being rated for 3,500 and 6,500 mAh. I heard the bottom 5% is being reserved for the mesh node itself, but that should mean the rating should be for 4,750 and 9,500 mAh.
I think they just messed up the units, 6.5Ah * 5V = 32.5Wh which seems reasonable from the 38.7Wh battery, as that's a total of 84% efficiency which is pretty typical for a power bank.
Most battery banks advertise their raw cell Ah/mAh ratings, which of course isn't the effective Ah at 5V. It seems like Heltec tried listing both ratings here.
Well, your phone needs at least 5 volts. So it sounds to me as though if you're using the node, then it can take advantage of the entire battery. But if you're using it to charge your phone, you can only take advantage of like 70% of the battery.
Right. Another really interesting idea in my opinion would be to integrate an SX1262 into laptops. That way, if you're ever off network, you can at least have a low bandwidth communication method.