Portable Phone Charger - 8th grade

During my 8th grade entrepreneurship class, my "company," King Productions, "offered" multiple products to our customers. I wanted to go a step beyond and actually design, create, and sell products through my company's name.

I decided to design portable phone chargers. This was created before the day where everyone and their dog had a lithium-ion rechargeable battery bank. My teacher told me he could use a phone charger when he was hunting and was in his tree stand.

So I went to the local hardware store and picked up some batteries that looked like they might last him a day at the stand. I decided lantern batteries would be the most cost effective route. Arriving at radio shack shortly after, I picked up a five volt regulator which would decrease the incoming power to a safe five volts. I also purchased some extra parts like boxes, alligator clips, and radio wire.

I assembled the phone charger and noticed it wouldn't work with my iPod. I looked around the internet and realized Apple required two volts to be going through the data leads. I went and bought the recommended resistors (two 22k ohm resistors, two 33k ohm resistors) and soldered them onto the product. Behold, I had created a phone charger than runs off of seven volts and can be used portably anywhere with a battery. Ended up being a amazing learning experience that only costed me $12.

My teacher was my first investor as he bought the phone charger for $20. I used this capital to create three more, none of which ended up selling as middle schoolers don't have expendable money.