Like a survival wiki?

I had remember seeing this a while ago, just found it again:
http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000270029372/

External battery pack for PDAs and phones than can charge from USB. Any one with basic soldering skills can bash together, and if you could modify it easily enough to use other styles of power and/or connector, if you you know basic circuitry.

Sort of, yes. The problem with Wiki's is that they can be a little unruly. But for an entirely electronic environment, that would work well. You can run mini web servlers and even mini-DBs on a PDA, but I don't know how well a wiki would run from there. Thus, a static doc organized into sections and chapters and such may prove more useful. Plus, if done correctly, could even be printed.

I know of several Linux doc projects that have gone to the printers and you are basically paying for the media. So, maybe after a certain point, ETS could get it printed and take some profit from the book sales? I don't think that's precluded in most of the licensing schemes....

I read that a while back and built myself a couple of these babies.
Lessons Learnt:
1. Soldering is not as easy as it looks
2. I am not a solder ninja
3. Forget the 9v battery, use a battery holder for 4 AA 1.5v. More juice in the 4 AAs and less heat. After charging the PDA / phone for a while the case will be hot.
4. The altoids tin makes a nice project box

The only issue will be the ability to view the data. I was ata client site recently and we were installing software off of a couple USB flash drives, mine a lexar jumpdrive and someone elses sandisk cruiser. We found that about 1/2 the windows pc's would actauly recognize the flash drives without problems, others would recognize one or the other and others still we would have to download the inf file from lexar or sandisk's web site and even then one or two old pc's had issues.
Other alturnatives I have thought of are:
1. PDA, palm/pocket pc whatever, these are popular and very entry level models can be bought for under $100, this way you can read your data.
2. mini/business card cd's. These couls fit in a PSK and even double as a signaling mirror, they hold ~200M.
3. Cell phone. Most of us carry one for one reason or another. Most cell phones made in the last few years have some basic pda functionality. Utilizing a cheap synch cable from ebay and free software called bitpim I've been able to send my address book, calendar and simple text memos to my phone so I have some basic data there as well.

How did you mount the voltage regulator chip? It looks like there is a screw hole opposite the contacts. IIRC this is for mounting a heat sink.

Realistically, the mini-CDs are still you best choice. Flash drives are great for EDC, but realistically, they have to take a back seat to a CD full of TXT files for portability. Much better for recovery information

The PDA is usable, until it fails, but they do fail. Never seen one that could take a bath. When something goes wrong, I figure I'm going to be wet, cold and bruised, none of which electronics like.

Haven't built it yet, but I thought I'd pass it on.

I'm not so keen on PDAs, myself, and I cac remember music almost as well as an iPod without the need for recharging. I figured some here, though, might find it nifty. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> Basic circuits was a long time ago for me, so someone shout out if I get this wrong. I probably will; I should check my external memory (books).

Input on the reg goes to the positive terminal, output to the device, ground to the negative on the battery. I'd build it, and then hit it with a meter to be sure, though. As I said, it's been a while for me; even if it wasn't, test everything first. These bits are cheap.

Silly me- twice I forgot to put this in:
http://misc.hackaday.com/entry/1234000520028239/
They also have this guy, which is a bit simplier. But maybe a bit too simple for my taste. It NEEDS a switch, or just take the battery off when not in use, becuase it will make a little heat for a while, then the battery will be dead.

Lots of good ideas here. I'll say this... Assuming youre going to put account numbers, SS number DL number etc on it, no matter what media you end up using, make sure you use excellent encyption. Otherwise if you lose it then it's just like losing your wallet or maybe worse. The good news is that quality file-level encryption software is both common and inexpensive.

I'm going to try building one with jacks to allow different batteries & device options. Using jacks wil allow using a small usb hub to run several items at once such as charging a PDA & an led light.