UPDATE: USB-C Adapter for full line of USB-C Macbooks!

Hi Everyone.

Thanks for emailing us your questions. We are still working hard on this project. 

USB-C is turning out to be harder than expected as getting it to work across all devices is not an easy task. One of the reasons why is because USB-C PD is a smart adapter which means there is communication between the charger and the device to adjust the voltage accordingly. Most of today's devices typically have one adapter to one device. 
Basically 1 to 1. USB-C is 1 to many.

The other delay has been our Courier unfortunately crushing our prototype during delivery which created a long wait whilst getting another one done :-(

Despite all of this, we are moving forward steadily and we will keep you all posted regarding our progress.
Thanks for your patience. 

Stay powered up!  

Mike

MCT-corp.com

HP Charge cable - Exclusive offer

Hi all,

Here's another Mikegyver Exclusive...(only found here!) 

Our HP charge cable helps you connect our batteries to your HP and includes a special sense pin to allow for full speed charging!

Check out its specs and more at:

http://mct-corp.com/store/index.php?product/page/2076/HP+Charge+Cable 

Stay powered up!  

Mike

MCT-corp.com

Battery Box conversion

Hi All,

Recently a customer came to us about converting their Batterybox. He was concerned that we might not be able to convert the Batterybox due to the software used to control it since removing the center pin on Magsafe end.

So this is what you read about Batterybox:

BatteryBox powers your laptop rather than charging it, keeping the battery at the same charge percentage - minimizing the number of cycles and stress on your MacBook. This way you get the most power out of BatteryBox without wasting any energy from it travelling through the MacBook battery first. ”

After reading this, the below was my response to his concerns:

There cannot be software managing the device in the way mentioned above.  In fact, your Macbook would behave EXACTLY the same as the above description if you disabled the internal chip within the Magsafe. In the early days of the Magsafe, there were a lot of knock off magsafe cable that lacked the charging chip. All the cable did in essence was power the Macbook and NOT charge it. In fact, we have even seen some customers see their internal battery drain during high CPU usage.

The bottom line is this: Think of a battery as a cup of water.  You either drip power into your Macbook, or you pour as much as you can into the Macbook, at the end of the day you'll still have the same run time.

So now that that is explained, lets show you how we converted the Batterybox with a Genuine magsafe cable with full charging functionality restored!

A little bit of additional tibit: this is how they are bypassing Apple Patent, but leaving out the control chip within the Magsafe!

Like it?

Let us know.

Stay powered up!  

Mike

MCT-corp.com

Electricity is like water...

Hi!

Did you know electricity is just like water? 

Recently we had to troubleshoot a problem with an adapter that kept blinking on and off when connected to a Surface Pro 4. After extensive troubleshooting I realized that this might make for a great blog. So here we go...

A customer approached us with what he thought was a problem with one of our car adapters; no matter what he did, it kept blinking on and off. I told him that the power source (his vehicle) was not providing enough power. Obviously this suggestion was laughable though, after all, it was a brand new large and powerful vehicle, plus his other smaller devices where working fine. Plus on top of that, if he put his Surface Pro 4 to sleep, it worked fine for a while.

But his setup was not regular in any way and as mentioned before...it was a large vehicle. 

No matter how much I tried to tell him that the wires going to his adapter did not have enough power to keep his Surface powered up, I could not convince him though that there was nothing wrong with our adapter and was politely asked to mail when we had an upgrade that fixed his power cycling problem even after showing him that a smaller car with less devices and shorter cable run from engine compartment to cab solved the problem!

The bottom line was that we were fighting physics!

In order to explain in the simplest possible way, I will use an analogy:

The power supply to your device is like a small garden hose. Your smaller devices just need the garden hose to be happy. Your larger devices (like the Surface Pro 4) need a Fire hose. You CAN get around this is by putting your device into sleep/shutdown mode so that it has enough time for the garden hose to fill up the internal cup (battery) thus allowing for water to be pulled from internal cup and the vehicle. But, when that cup gets depleted, however, it simply pulls from garden hose again and then starts to choke.

So in order to fix it, you have to give it a bigger hose...so it has plenty of water to operate on. Obviously to turn your "garden hose" into a "fire hose", you need to give it a bigger wire. 
Another thing to consider sometimes is a bottleneck between the power source and the device. Think of it like a kink in your water hose.

I hope I have made something rather complicated a bit clearer...if not let me know in the comments below  :-)

Stay powered up!  

Mike
MCT-corp.com

USB-C Adapter for full line of USB-C Macbooks!

Available soon!

We have had so many requests for our USB-C battery and Car adapters for Macbook Pro's (and other USB-C devices) and so have decided to give you a bit of a teaser with pics of our prototype.

Our prototype in production

When done, it will be compatible with all our batteries, and will charge from your car. It will support full line Power Delivery devices including the 87W Macbook Pro as well as USB-C outputs of 20V,4.3A,   20V,3A, 14.5V,2A, 9V,3A and 5.2V,2.4A

Not Pictured: USB-A Output:  3.6-6.5V/3A, 6.5-9V/2A, and 9-12V/1.5A

We have had a few delays in getting our USB-C to work with a wide range of device but we think that we should be ready for release in around 2 more months.

In the meantime, we have sent a few prototypes out into the market to select individuals for testing to assist us with our final design so please let us know if you'd like to consider testing one.

If you would be interested in placing a Pre-Order, please let us know in the comments below.

Stay powered up! 

Mike
MCT-corp.com

Why inverters are a waste of energy.

Inverters vs Direct Current.

We have actually covered this issue so many times on our website and Q&A pages, that it took me completely by surprise when I realized that I had actually never blogged about it! So you, our loyal blog followers have never learnt why inverters are a complete waste of energy or why you cannot use inverters for your large devices such as Macbook Pro's - well at least not from me :-)

So without any further ado..after just receiving yet another email from a user who asked why he should switch from and inverter which would cost him $39.95 to our more expensive setup... I figured its time to explain. 

Without making it too complicated, 

1.  Inverters convert DC power (car/Airplane/boat power) into AC power (household power). 
2.  Say for instance you are using an Apple adapter with an inverter, the Apple adapter actually  converts the AC power BACK to DC power. 
3.  You can see for yourself that you are wasting a tremendous amount of energy converting from  DC to AC,  then BACK to DC. (That's 12vdc -> 110vac -> 16.5vdc in Geek speak)

TADAAAAA!!

Obviously, this could mean a dead car/airplane/boat battery sooner then you think if using straight battery power! For this reason inverters are often times useless on airplanes because they supply limited power and also why inverters will almost always fail to charge your Macbook or will charge it but shock you in the process.

Here is a diagrammatic representation of the scenario:



The above diagram, however, depicts how our DC adapter works. It just modifies what is already laptop friendly DC power (in your car/airplane/boat), from 12vdc to 16.5vdc. A small step up and no wasted energy! Also, because it is extremely efficient, it leaves you with enough power to charge your Macbook Pro enough to last your entire airline trip - including delays - not to mention longer run times if you are using batteries.

 If you are an avid follower, you will remember one of our previous blogs in which we lent our DC adapter to a fellow airline passenger who was experiencing this exact same problem!

Our solution may not be the cheapest, but we can assure you that you will get more work done as we will most certainly save you time, and as the saying goes... "Time is money"!

Stay powered up!  Efficiently :-)

Mike
MCT-corp.com

How to make a backup light source in case you run out of power.

Hi Everyone,

If you follow our blog, you will see that we have blogged about how our batteries can be used for devices that are hard to connect, like Macbooks, Lenovo Yoga, and Microsoft Surface devices. You will also have seen that they can also be used everyday life to make your life easier ~ see how we stopped our dog from digging up our lawn. In this blog, though, I am going to tell you how they came about giving me much needed light in a really tight situation.

Not so long ago, Hurricane Matthew hit Florida with forces not recorded since 2008. We were blessed to escape with no injuries but like so many exposed to these kind of forces of nature, we found ourselves without power and no generator. In true #MikegyverStyle though I realized; we might not have a generator but we DID have TONS of batteries. 

I am sort of a "pack-rat" and save things "just in case" it can be used for something else - much to my wife's dismay. One of these particular items are automotive light bulbs that are only partially burnt out with one of their filaments still in working order.

Now as mentioned, we had TONS of batteries and quite a few of these partially burnt out automobile light bulbs, so I figured (as most people do who have ever run out of power or light whether camping or simply domestically) that our first priority was light!

A quick trip to the garage netted me a used bulb that I'd saved from my car. I then soldered up a wire and connector to the good filament on bulb, like this:

Set our voltage on the battery to 12v, plugged it in, and we had an instant light like this:

Now that we could see we could get more done and set about creating more #MikegyverStyle power solutions to get us through the crisis.

Of course when day dawned we whipped out our new solar panel kits to power up our batteries again and were ready for the next night.

I am grateful to our batteries for getting us through a tough time and my wife is now grateful for all the burnt out light bulbs I keep :-)

If you have one of our batteries and would like a step by step of how to set up your own Mikegyver LightBulb in case you are ever in a pinch, simply leave a comment below.

Stay Powered Up,

Mike

MCT-Corp