I was working on an Arduino project and when I finished it I said “well it’d be cool to power it with a USB powerbank and put it outside”.

I did that. I connected the Arduino to the powerbank and it worked!

But after about 20 seconds the Arduino powered off.

Well, the powerbank turned off. And along with it the Arduino.

Turned out the Arduino didn’t consume enough power to be noticeable by the powerbank that thought nothing was connected and it was just wasting its cycles.

I found some solutions to the problem, involving making the Arduino consume more power. Like https://www.instructables.com/USB-External-Battery-Packs-on-Arduino-turns-OFF/.

Or getting a powerbank that didn’t turn off automatically.

In my case I decided to go with a rechargeable battery instead, since I was working with an Arduino MKR 1010 WiFi and it had a 3.7V Li-Po battery option.

Lessons in this unit:

0:	Introduction
1:	An introduction to Arduino
2:	Arduino vs Raspberry Pi
3:	The Arduino Uno rev 3 board
4:	The Arduino Uno WiFi rev 2 board
5:	The Arduino MKR WiFi 1010
6:	Introduction to the Arduino Programming Language
7:	The Arduino Create Platform
8:	Arduino: using libraries
9:	Arduino Serial Communication
10:	How to connect to a WiFi network using an Arduino
11:	Read values from an Arduino via HTTP
12:	▶︎ Powering an Arduino with a power bank
13:	What to buy to get started with Arduino and Electronics