When someone buys a portable charger they often forget to charge it; it ends up just a waste of money that they use once and never plug in again. Even if they do remember to charge their portable charger, it's a pain to carry around as it just bounces around in their pocket or gets lost in their bag. We set out to solve this problem. After seeing how many people have portable chargers but forget to charge them, it made me think. Our idea was that, since boots are already heavy, if there was a charger in the boot, you wouldn’t notice the small weight difference. And to solve the problem of forgetting to charge, we made a wireless charging pad in the shape of a boot tray that charges the boot automatically.
Our original sticky note said “Boot Phone Charger.” The idea was a slot where you could place your portable charger and you could plug in a wire and use your charger while out and about. The problem was that portable chargers were uncomfortable to carry around, so we thought if we put it in the boot that would eliminate that problem. The idea came to me after going on a field trip for innovation when I was carrying a portable charger all day and it was so annoying that I ended up carrying the charger in my hand instead of my pocket.
When I told the class about my solution they did not like it one bit. They said how they would never trust a battery in their boot because people would just kick it. I thought of that and made sure that the battery was padded and protected so it wouldn't break. The class still was not happy with the idea so we thought of problems with portable chargers. One of those problems was charging the portable charger. We thought of a idea of a charging pad where you put your boot down on a pad and it charges the portable charger automatically. When I said this, the class sat up in their seats and seemed interested. And that is were I gained more confidence to build the Boot Phone Charger. The boot charger would eventually be manufactured with the battery and charging pieces built into the boot, but for now had to cut into the boot.
The Boot Phone Charger is a device that charges your phone straight from your boot. It allows the user to charge their phone from wherever they are. The biggest problems with standard portable phone chargers are that they are bulky to carry and hard to remember to recharge. The Boot Phone Charger solves both of these problems. Since boots are already heavy, you barely notice a difference of the lightweight battery and charging coil. And almost magically, you don't have to do anything special to charge this charger — they charge automatically when you put them in the boot tray, something many people do with their boots already. The Boot Phone Charger has a 1000 mAH LiPo battery inside the rear sole of the boot and an inductive charging receiver embedded in the front sole of the boot. Every time it's placed on the boot tray, it is recharged by Adafruit’s 5 Volt, 500 mA inductive charging transmitter, which is embedded in the tray. The Boot Phone Charger will rescue your phone next time it's low on power!
