Remote monitoring on capacity of portable power bank in testing laboratories

In this paper, we successfully demonstrated an application in monitoring the capacity of portable power bank by developing a system with the Arduino platform which allows the testing practitioners in the testing laboratories to test, record and analyze the portable power banks under test in a remote manner. For standardizing the measurement, a testing standard for measuring the capacity of portable power bank was drafted according to the circuit design in charging and discharging, environment and users' habits in Hong Kong. The developed system was implemented by analyzing numerous portable power banks existed in the market following the procedures listed in the drafted standard. The result showed that only the tested portable power bank labelled with rated capacity could deliver the capacity mentioned. All of the tested portable power bank labelled with capacity only could not provide adequate information for fair comparison which measured capacity was always lower than the capacity on the package.