OK, about that battery I mentioned above......
Thanks to
@russ331 often mentioning his experience with the Anker Astro E4 external battery pack I decided to buy one. Of course, the Astro E5 had been introduced with greater capacity and that seemed appealing too, although more costly.
So, I clicked my way over to Amazon to buy one and somehow stumbled onto the
Lenoge 50,000mAh Universal Portable Power Bank selling for a mere $22.14 USD with free shipping. My first thought was to dismiss such a product out of hand as piece of junk making unrealistic claims about its capacity but somehow it gave me pause and I spent a day or two thinking it over and decided to throw caution to the wind and buy the thing. What the heck, it's only twenty two bucks...How bad can it be? One of its interesting features is that it is a lithium-polymer battery which offers a slight safety advantage over the traditional 18650 cells usually used in this type of pack.
I've had this thing for several months now and I've been quite amazed by it for the price. It turned out to be solidly built, it works flawlessly and reliably and it cranks! It has over-voltage protection and auto shut-off when charging and turns off automatically when it detects that there is no load connected. My only complaint is that if I plug in a Mobius without remembering to press the on button it will start recording anyway. This isn't really a problem except that you end up with a hum on the audio. You have to remember to turn the unit on until the blue LEDs light and at that point it engages the circuitry that filters the noise and you get perfectly clean audio. I guess these things weren't designed with dash cams in mind. While I doubt that the battery is really meeting its rated capacity of 50,000 mAh but it could easily be half that or possibly more. I've noticed that some reviewers on Amazon who complain about the capacity seem to not know how to properly charge and care for this type of battery, especially during this first few charge cycles. Every time I think about testing to see just how long it will run a Mobius or other dash cam I end up abandoning the idea for lack of patience. When the battery first arrived with a partial charge, I deep drained it before the first full charge as part of the break-in procedure as recommended by the manufacturer. I hooked up an old dash cam and left it run overnight. The next morning the camera was still running and I still had two blue indicator LEDs of power with the second one flashing. It is a good idea to deep drain this type of battery pack (but not completely) when new and then give it a full charge. Then occasionally (every few months) do this again. This is called
battery calibration and will give you better performance and battery life in the long run.
So now, I regularly use the pack to run both my front and rear dash cams in parking mode when away from my vehicle for as long as I want and I sometimes use it to charge my iPad via a standard Apple Lightning to USB cable. (it has one 2.1 amp USB socket and one 1 amp socket)
Edit: I forgot to mention that I have had the occasion to use this battery pack to do short term surveillance (a few hours) out on my rural property using a Mobius. I also use it in a similar manner to observe and film wildlife with a camouflaged Mobius.
This is a generic Chinese battery pack
sold under many different names on Amazon and a wide range of prices. I found one selling on Amazon for $15.00 and another popular one going under the name
AllPowers for $36.99. They appear to ALL be same battery and they all apparently come from the same factory.
So, if you are looking for a decent reliable external battery pack for a low price, you wouldn't go wrong with one of these.
If you are looking for more of a "brand named", perhaps higher end product
The Wirecutter recently published an excellent review of a number of these external USB battery packs including the Anker E5 which unfortunately had a significant flaw. I really don't know how the Lenoge battery would hold up in this review other than the fact that it is probably bigger and heavier than the competition but then again it boasts more than 4 or 5 times the average capacity of the others at half the price. I also don't know how it would stack up in terms of other criteria like the time it takes to charge but I have no complaints.
). It sounds from the wikipedia entry that this specification has now been defined and updated. Would that mean that more recent devices are more likely to be compatible? So, for example I have a generic lithium pack I bought on Amazon and it works properly with the Mobius and every dash camera I've hooked it up to with various cables (5 pin) and even charges my iPad properly with no problems using Apple's Lightning to USB cable. The unit runs until it reaches its low voltage cut-off point, turns itself off if there is no load or detects that the device it is charging comes up to voltage. It can happily run two Mobius cams for many hours. I thought they would all do this today.