--- title: Fun with Battery-Powered C.H.I.P. Computers author: George Mandis date: 2017-01-21 tags: post, post, tech, tiny-computers --- I'm in love with the [$9 C.H.I.P. computers](https://getchip.com). They're so much fun and so easy to start working with right out of the box! Their tiny footprint and low-cost encourage creative experimentation. One of the things I've wanted to play around with is creating public wifi nodes and leaving little surprises — benevolent ones — for people that might try to connect to them. That's a different blog post unto itself, but one of the things I needed for this particular idea was a good external batter to run the computer off of. Another nice things about The C.H.I.P. computer is that it has very modest power requirements, so a quality external battery designed to give charges for smartphones or tablets will likely be more than enough to get at least a few hours. But I wanted much more than a few hours so I opted for the [EasyAcc Monster 20000mAh Power Bank](http://amzn.to/2jP4VW3), which is still pretty affordable at $29. The 20,000 mAh (milli-amp-hours) is much more than enough to the C.H.I.P. computer. In a not particularly scientific test I setup the computer to: - Connect to my local wifi - Create its own wifi network - Run an Apache server - Write to a log file once per minute with the current timestamp The reason I did that last step was because I wanted to let the computer run until the battery drained completely and see how long it lated. The end results was about **46.5 hours**! Granted, it wasn't really doing much. If I'd run the same script having it ping another website once per minute I would expect that number to dip noticeably, but even *half* that amount would still be plenty for my needs. So if you're looking for a cheap computer and battery to make public computer-based, wifi-based art projects — and potentially get into good trouble — I highly recommend the [$9 C.H.I.P. computers](https://getchip.com) and the [EasyAcc Monster 20000mAh Power Bank](http://amzn.to/2jP4VW3).