Anker Powercore 5000?

Proffieboards
1

Hello!

I have previously built a couple FX-SaberOS Arduino-based lightsabers as a way of dipping my toes in the sabersmithing world. I’m preparing to move up to a Proffie build with a v2.2 board.

While browsing another saber forum, I stumbled on a thread from a builder who used a 5000mAh USB battery pack as a power source (e.g. wired a USB-A connector as the power connection). In context, that builder was using it for an RGB saber, whereas I’ll be using it to drive two 144 pixel addressable strips. From what I’ve found in the info, the 5v shouldn’t be an issue for the LEDs, but I haven’t found this specific use-case addressed anywhere outside of that (very old) forum post. When building my Arduino sabers, I researched and wired them up to use 4 nimh batteries (since they were for my kids).

The specific battery pack I’m exploring for this new build is an Anker PowerCore 5000, and it looks like it’s 5v~2a for total output and the battery capacity is 5000mAh. It’s also listed as 3.7Vdc, 18.5Wh.

Any thoughts from more experienced folks as to whether this is suitable for a Proffie 2.2 build? The Proffie looks to be able to handle it as near as I can tell for looking through the documentation and searching on the forums, but I’m not yet experienced enough with the board to be confident.

Thanks in advance! All the information on the forums has been greatly helpful overall.

2

2A is not going to help you much when it comes to powering a neopixel blade.
You could in theory use a 5v battery pack, but you don’t need it, 3.7v is sufficient, and more efficient.

Just get one of these instead:

3

Thanks, Prof!

4

Follow up question as I was doing some more reading/perusing on battery types–

Has there been anyone who has explored using LiFePo4 batters over Li-ion? I was looking at an online battery distributor at some 18650s and, through the magic of Google-Fu, stumbled on top of these guys:

Would there be any issue with the 3.2v on the LiFePo as opposed to the 3.7v of the lithium ion?

5

I don’t recommend it, there are a few different reasons, but the important one is that the lower voltage will make green and blue colors weaker on the blade. It just won’t look very good.