Gear/Hiking Apps

@ Perry

In the mold of lighter pack but addressing a MUCH more complex problem, I can see the need for a power calculator to solve three use cases: 1) the weekend backpacker, 2) the long distance backpacker, and 3) the emergency power outage due to earthquake or wildfire. (In reference to the latter, here in Northern California PG&E has been communicating to local communities that if there is a wildfire in there area, they might be without power for up to three or four days.

The problem statement for Scenario 1 goes something like this, for my four- night winter snow camping trip, I am taking my Sony RX100, IPhone, Garmin InReach, and Kindle Reader. Will my fully charged Anker PowerCore 10000 get me through the long weekend?  For scenario 3, I have two Anker PowerCore 20100s in my emergency kit that I discharge and recharge twice a year. We need to hunker down for 5 days but want to use 2 Apple Smartphones, 1 Android phone, 2 kindles, and also be able to recharge a 3 NiteCore LR10 Camping lanterns.

You would probably have to limit the calculator to two or three smartphones, specific charging cables, and two or three USB battery bricks. The user would have to input such variables as expected ambient temperature, hours of use of respective devices, power mode of the respective devices (are all the power save options turned on),  and for the Smart Phones, apps used.

Anker might be interested in helping. You could crowdsource data on power consumption to the BPL community.
Cheers

<very evil grin>
I find it much easier to not take any electronics which might need recharging. Calculator not needed, and I am a lot lighter too. This is BPL, after all.
(Cautious wording: my simple digital watch is of course electronic.)
</very evil grin>

Cheers

@ Roger

Yup. That would be the path to simplicity (and lighter weight).

Cheers

Much less worry, too.

Cheers

This is actually a pretty cool idea that could be manageable to get released. Thanks for the input! I’m going to mull it over a bit. I have a couple of immediate thoughts about how difficult it might be to control for temperature, general quality of the product power brick, age of the power brick, etc.. but it’d be pretty cool to be able to even get a reasonable estimate on it.

@ Perry.  I think if you assume the users are using the batteries within specified ambient temps, you can bound the problem and build a model.

If you limited the power bricks to the four or five models recommended in the past here on BPL, you probably cover 90% of the target market. And if you tell Anker what you are doing, they might be willing to help.

Cheers

Bruce