Amcrest Battery Pack with USB and PD (Power Delivery)
Lets start with disclosures: Amcrest posts regularly about offering to provide manufacturer rebates or reimbursement if you purchase something and reach out to them to request be eligible to be part of that. I had a project coming along and needed larger battery pack to test. I figured I could combine things. So if all works out, I get to keep this battery pack and hopefully be reimbursed for telling you about what I did and why its good for your phones and devices, but, its tricky for other things…
I’ll explain more at the end.
The Battery Pack
I was most interested in the pack because of the detailed power usage and available charge in an easy to ready LED layout. Other than that the plastic case isn’t flimsy and doesn’t flex. The battery pack feels very solid in the hand and is snapped together without seeing any screws or tabs or clips. It’s shape is inline with with the Samsung S10 or the iPhone X I have. So carrying the phone and the charger together when walking or moving from portable location to portable location kept it in grip while its a large pack – it was easily handled.
The weight is on par with similarly sized and capacity battery packs and it is remember multiple time multiple charges pack; you’re capable of maintaining a few devices for charging so the weight is warranted. The ability to share power with multiple devices at a time makes it great for a family backseat as well (our car doesn’t have rear USB or outlets for the back seat folks. It barely has that upfront now that I think of it). The pack simply fits in a lot of bags and carry on cases for gear – its shape just works in pouches and bags. You barely know its there.
Charging; Geeky Numbers and Testers
We have to assume that all of these little monitors have a percent error and also the little USB testers also have a similar calibration struggle. I had no interest in making it perfect or proving it was off while also I just wanted to know was it close enough to believe.
The result is that yes, their LED read out is certainly believable.
The Amcrest 26800mAh battery pack confirmed PD mode for both iphone X, iPhone XR, Samsung S10 and works almost perfectly in mix mode for charging devices. It is totally capable and the “Almost Perfectly” is better explained below. If you’re charging devices, phones, tablets and such – it’s golden.
Charging and temperatures didn’t create any concerns. Things are gonna get hot when the charge or discharge voltage like this and the battery pack is of no exception to that. The heat doesn’t appear to bleed into the battery cell compartment area which is a very good thing and it wasn’t hot enough to hurt – but you can feel it. It’s warm to the touch.
When timing the charge from the absolutely discharged to fully charged, using a PD charger as mentioned, I was unable to obtain the full charge in 6hrs.
Simple Conclusion – I like it for the Phones and Tablets.
Overall this pack has been used over a week and it’s seen ice skating rinks, car rides, beach trips and the backyard. It’s price does seem inline with many packs and it does offer more than most with this LED read out. This is a NON-Affiliate link to Amazon to see for yourself – https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08XDH5XN9/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Simple Caveat; Voltage Drop on Special Situations
The Amcrest battery pack cannot sustain the 5v output on the USB-A ports when connecting an additional device to the secondary USB-A port. If a device is connected to the open USB-A port – the 5v output will drop and it seems to drop below the a threshold for RasPi 4, RasPi 3, the Hak5 WiFi Pineapple Mark 5 and Mark 7. The battery pack quickly recovers, however what’s been done is the possibility of data loss or card/flash corruption. I am disappointed in this experience – the capacity of the battery pack is there. This is NOT a limit on the pack of batteries but the circuitry running the USB Voltage control and regulation. I am not sure if the circuit resets or if its just a power drop.
With that said, I originally thought I could use this battery pack to power RasP 4’s in order to continue a build out of what is called “War Driving” which is a practice of documenting WiFi Access Point Names and their GPS location. The issue is that sometimes I want to pull the MicroSD Card and swap files – that requires a power down and power up of the device and doing so would impact the other device running.
War Driving /WiFi Monitoring & Camera Batteries
The Amcrest USB C Power Bank at 26800mAh sustained solid performance on booted and remaining running devices. The Hak5 WiFi Pineapples (old and new version) worked perfectly with the battery pack as long I plugged them in and left them plugged in.
The Amcrest USB C Power Bank at 26800mAh also kept up with the power requirements for the RasPi’s as long as they remained running and weren’t unplugged.
Finally, in an unexpected twist – I had forgotten to charge batteries for my camera. While this might just be the least expected use of this Amcrest USB C Power Bank at 26800mAh it did indeed get the batteries charged in time to be able to take some photos. In a 35 min drive it got the camera batteries which were very low to a significant charge in time to get some use out of the camera.
After another week or two of use I will come back and update this page with any other tests or scenarios I had to use this pack for – however for now – its the top use battery pack in the travel bin for then we hit the road or head to the beach to keep things charged and running.