 Welcome to the show. It's me, JP, and it's time for this week's episode of JP's product pick of the week. And we are here with an oldie, but goodie, perhaps the oldie-ist, but goodie-ist. Because wait until you see. Wait until you see what the product ID number is on this one, in fact. First thing I'll do, in fact, is I'm going to send you over here to the product page. This is the very esteemed and venerable product ID number 14. So head there or go to this QR code and you will go to the product page. You can watch this video inside the product page and you will get a huge discount during the show. No coupon code required. It's 50% off for this week's product pick. Now I did a little research and did a little check-in-around. This is the oldest product ID that is still a product in the store other than a magnet. There's a rare earth magnet, which I believe is product number 10. And that was part of the Spoke POV kit, I think, but Spoke POV kit still exists. I think you can go to product ID 1, but it's discontinued. It's just still there for some reason. I think it's product 5 or 10 is the magnet. And this one, this is really it, number 14. This is one of the ones that started it all. So I'll send you there. Before I say anymore what I'll do, we don't have a new, new, new product release video from Lamor on this one because she wasn't, I don't even know if she was doing the Ask an Engineer show at the time when this was released. This may predate a lot of the video efforts by Adafruit. But I did find online a clip from a TV show or an internet show where Lamor was being interviewed and she gave a little bit of a backgrounder on this product pick. So I'm going to do that now. Let's do that now. Here we go. Doing that now. This is the Minty Boost because it's very minty and it gives your phone a boost. And this is actually our most popular kit that we sold. This is the Minty Boost because it's very minty and it gives your phone a boost. And this is actually our most popular kit that we sold thousands of years. It's so soft. Yeah, so basically it's two double A batteries and then there's a little circuit board that you build and you put it in here and it basically has a USB port just like on your computer and you can plug in, it's great for iPods, but you can also use cell phones, PlayStation portables and other game things and pretty much anything that you can charge via USB, you can plug it in and it'll charge it up. Yeah, that's pretty impressive going way, way, way back. So what I'll do is I'm going to grab mine and we'll take a look at this and then let's talk about it. So here we have, it's really the contents of this or the product. This is just an add-on, an optional add-on. So let's get to it. My product pick of the week this week is, let me get one that I've built already, my product pick of the week this week is the MintyBoost kit, version three. So this is a USB five volt source that you can use to charge things like your phone or an iPod or your Zoom player or who knows what, using just some common double A batteries. You can build it into a Mint tin. This little Altoids gum tin, sized tin is perfect. It's what it was designed for. You can also build it into other things if you like. In fact, I've got one that I built years ago. This might be an earlier version of the kit in kind of a beat-up, large-sized Altoid Mint tin and the reason I did that is you can actually fit the batteries vertically in there and have some space for a cable. So I traveled with this for a long time, allowed me to have a little cable there to charge a device. Usually it was an iPod with the old 20 pin connector. But this is a kit that you build. So you get the circuit board, you get the parts for it, and you get to put it together. It's a terrific soldering kit. So you can see here, this is what you get. Let me shake these out and we'll have a look at the parts that come with this. So in the MintyBoost kit, you get the custom PCB, you get the regulator. This is the boost converter that takes your battery power, whatever it is, 2, 3 volts, and boosts it up to 5 volts, has a little socket for that. We have some capacitors. We have a inductor coil, a couple small caps, and some resistors and a diode. These resistors are used to let an Apple device in particular know that it's OK to charge. And this was something that evolved over the course of the MintyBoost kit, was the ability to not just send 5 volts, but to send the proper resistance over the data pins of the USB so that the I device would actually charge. And you get a standard USB connector that you can plug a cable into. If you take a look at one that I just built yesterday, this brand shiny new one I put together yesterday, you can see here, we get a battery pack. That was the one piece I didn't show. For two double A's, we get some tape, some double foam stick tape, so you can stick these parts down once you've soldered it together. And when you put your batteries in here, it doesn't need an on-off switch because it draws so little power being plugged in. The quiescent power is minimal. So this, I believe, lasts for a couple of years before these batteries are drained if you never, ever use it. But when you plug it in, you're ready to go. So if I take my phone and somewhere here, there it is, I'm going to take a standard USB cable. This one happens to go to the Lightning for Apple. And let me open up my phone here. If I plug this in and you watch the charge up there at the top, when I plug that in, you can see it is now charging. So even though this is a super modern device, it is able to charge from the Minty Boost. No problem. It doesn't get fooled by that. So I haven't run into things that I can't charge with it. Obviously, if you have a giant device, huge battery, iPad or something like that, you could have issues. But with your standard small devices, this thing is really great. Some facts about it. Let me go to my notes here. This one uses if the LT-1302 boost converter. This changed over the course of the history of it. And one of the neat things is if you take a look at the Learn Guide, let me get secondary me off of there. There we go. If you take a look at the Learn Guide for the Minty Boost, this goes through how to build it, parts, how to use it. And interestingly, in this little process section, we get documentation about the history of the kit, some inspiration with some 9-volt-based converters that exist before it. And then the process of going and engineering this one to work really well. And then the process of going through and figuring out how to make it work with more modern i-devices. So it's a really interesting look at LaMoure's process of building and refining this over the years. This has been out for, what, 15 years or something now. So you can go through and take a look at this, see how this was put together. I'll just jump real quick to the main page for it. So this is what you get. If I refresh this page, we should see. Hey, look at that, $9.75 is a really great deal for this. You get everything you need, except for, you'll need an Altoids-sized gum tin, size tin if you want to build it this way. You can tack that on here for $2. We sell those for $2. Or you may have something else you want to build it into a deck of cards or a bigger tin like I did, build it into an old Walkman. Wherever you want to place that, it doesn't take too much. You just need to have space to put new batteries in and space for the USB port. And like I said, you don't need a coupon code or anything. This is just going to be this price during the show. So if you want to get one or a couple, they make a pretty neat gift for someone that maybe you want to teach how to solder. Because this is a soldering kit. It's a fairly simple one, nothing too tricky on it and nothing that's likely to get overheated. We have the socket connector for the boost converter. So that chip that I see goes into a socket. You don't solder it directly. So a really nice kit, fun to put together. And then you get that creative aspect afterwards of deciding how you're going to house it, what kind of case you're going to put it in. Let's see, other things I wanted to mention about it. The process of putting it together, I mentioned it took me about a half an hour yesterday to put it together from beginning to end, including filming it and making the little case, cutting out the case for it. Probably half that time to put the solder kit together. But I'm an experienced solderer. If it's someone new, take a couple of hours, take your time with it. There's some great documentation and learn guide on how to put it together. What I did is after I put it together, I did a compressed one minute take on the build. So this is what it looks like sped up really fast. So take a look at the Minty Boost build. Yeah, it took a little longer to build than it seems there, but it is a really fun and straightforward build, nothing freaky about it. Let's see, what else? Other questions, someone asked me, and I got to, I'm going to have to look this up, I'll post it in the notes afterwards. If you Google Adafruit Minty Boost, maybe 10 or 20 videos down, you'll find the show that Lamor was on doing that demo. And there are a couple other examples you'll find of Lamor. And then lots of other people who've built these over the years because they've been around for a while. It mentions also in the, if we take a look at the main page here, I think it does mention on here that this one actually works pretty well also with a solar setup. So you can make a solar Minty Boost as well. If you want to start with this, but ditch the batteries and use this as the beginnings of a solar project. We have also some other solar chargers which I've shown before, but this one is fairly versatile. You can use it for a number of different things. Also, you can use it with lithium ion, but again, we have some more specific dedicated products for that that'll allow you to charge the lithium batteries as well. Let's see, what else? Not a lot else to say about it. It's a fun build. It is super useful. I have built, I've had a couple of them, one this size that my daughter ran off with, she uses that all the time, just to have a spare that doesn't require something to plug in. And you can imagine, these are great for camping and other cases, travel where you may not have easy access to charging up rechargeables, but you can almost always get yourself some double A's. And you can also use rechargeable nickel metal hydride double A's in there, but the alkalines work great, and that's pretty much what I've always used in here. So let me see, any other questions in the chat? Yeah, Lenpop, thanks for answering. Someone asked if the tins are included, the tins are not included, we have them for two bucks. And like I said, these are specifically designed to fit that mint tin really well, but you can put it in any enclosure you want. It's kind of a fun, creative exercise. Lenpop says they looked at their order history and they saw product number 14 was in their first ate a fruit order. That is fantastic, that's really great. I'll have to check mine. I think mine was the spoke POV kit, which might've been somewhere in the first five products or something like that. Mike PS, can it be used as a power source or only for charging? It can be used as a power source. So if you, in fact, let me demonstrate that. If you take something, let me go to an overhead here. Again, thanks, that's a good question. It's not just for charging. So here is a circle playground, blue fruit, and there is my minty boost. And so if I take my, I'm gonna grab that tiny little USB cable I had that's convenient for this. So this is a USB micro B cable to USB A. So if I take this and plug it in, I am now essentially powering with five volt USB, which this circle playground blue fruit really loves. So now it's got power direct to it. It's not a charging situation. I don't remember what the code on here actually does, but apparently it's got a nice boot up sequence. So I'm not charging a battery. There is no battery involved on this side of it. I'm just using the alkalines over the chart, our boost circuit. So I'm getting a nice five volt, about up to 500 milliamps output on this. So that'll run that thing forever and ever. So you can charge stuff with it. You can power stuff directly off of it. Roof is asked, does Noah and Pedro have a 3D printed case this same size? That's a great question. I was wondering this, I forgot to check. This is certainly a fun 3D printing type of project. And if you look online, you will find people have modeled this and this size Altoids tin as 3D models. So you can print that out rather than using a tin if that's easier. And then you can make your own special cutouts for those without having to cut things. We do not include mints. I'm sorry, thin man. When you get the $2 add-on Adafruit mint tin, it is mint gumless, none in there. OPS about rechargeables. Yes, double A rechargeables will work just fine for it. Todd, yes, you can charge your Zoom player from it. That's maybe more period appropriate. Yeah, the hiccup of these was the iPhone 3.5, I think was the first one that started to get annoyed with things that were trying to charge it that didn't have those resistors to tell what the thing was. And probably I think this was like an Apple authorized. They wanted to only have authorized chargers in their ecosystem. And so there's some good videos on our YouTube of LeMore reverse engineering, I think a Belkin product to see what the resistors were on the data plus and data minus lines of USB that actually convinced the iOS device to charge. All right, I think that's gonna do it. Okay, so let's wrap this up. Don't forget, you can head over and pick up one or 10 of these right now for half-offs, a $9.75 for the kit plus a tin if you don't have one. If you wanna buy one there and no coupon code, just go ahead and head over to that site, pick it up, throw it in your cart, hit buy before the end of the show, which is wrapping up right about now and you'll get it for the discounted price. So that is my product pick of the week. That's my product pick of the week. It is the Minty Boost Kit version three. And I'm just hanging the PCB up there because I don't wanna hang the whole case. Thank you everyone for stopping by for Adafruit Industries, I'm John Park and this has been JP's product pick of the week. Bye-bye.