LOOK: La Salle students create ID case with power bank

MANILA, Philippines – Tired of looking for available sockets in your classroom just to charge your phone? How about bringing bulky power banks or losing your USB drives?

Meet Chargee, the brainchild of third year engineering students from De La Salle University. It has a built-in 1900 mAh power bank and retractable 128gb storage flashdrive, and can give an iPhone 6 roughly one full charge. 

The invention  has gone viral on social media for addressing a long-standing problem in one slim package.

Andreana Santos, Celine Solis, David Zinampan, Ivan Yeung, and Sarah Tan developed the raw design and the idea, while Angelo Casimiro helped  build the working prototype.

As of posting, the photo has drawn 50,000 reactions and has been shared over 34,000 times.

Solis, Zinampan, and Santos are BS Industrial Engineering majors. Tan and Yeung are BS Industrial Management Engineering majors minoring in Information Technology, while Casimiro is a BS Electronics Communications Engineering major.

Zinampan said their creation was a school project. “Chargee” is a combination of the words “charge” and ID. 

“Initially, we created this product for emergency purposes but we decided to make it more convenient for the users by increasing the capacity of the power bank,” he said.

“We saw a similar product that incorporates a flash drive in their ID holder, and we thought of adding a power bank as well,” said Solis. “We know that this will benefit students and employees since we use our smartphones often in school or work.”

She added that they also asked help from others, including their professor Dr Jennifer Gutierrez to bring the concept to life. The group worked on the project for a month while juggling other responsibilities.

Santos, for her, part, said that when looking at the bigger picture in creating products, “its always about solving problems that society is experiencing, may it be big or small.”

“That was actually the first thing that was taught to us, to create something that solves a problem,” she added.

When asked what’s in store for Chargee’s future, Yeung shared that the team will focus on improving its features and will do some durability tests.

“We are still conceptualizing as a group, but we are strongly considering mass-producing the product,” he said.

Although Chargee is the group’s main priority at the moment, the group is not closing its doors when it comes to creating another unique product.

“We may be looking into inventing new products in the future, but as of now the Chargee is our priority,” Yeung said.

“Angelo Casimiro, however, has always been passionate in making ideas come to reality. Future inventions would depend on ideas presented to him or that he brainstormed himself. Some of his notable inventions have been the creation of his own BB-8,” he added, referring to the life-sized toy Casimiro created of the popular Star Wars character.  – Rappler.com

Annabella Garcia is Rappler intern. She is currently taking BA Film in the University of the Philippines Diliman.