ASMO charger finds success on Indiegogo

After last year’s attempt on Kickstarter the Smart Charger is back on Indiegogo and successfully funded hitting $41,466 of their €10,000 goal.

We’re fans of the ASMO Charger for doing what you’d expect a charger to do – charge your phone when you’re phone is plugged in, and not waste any energy when a phone isn’t connected. But the fact of the matter is that those USB chargers you have plugged into your wall do draw a slight amount of energy even without a phone plugged in. As a result, we’re burning through electricity just having something plugged into the wall.

Some competitors in the “eco charger” space try to solve the problem by putting a physical button on your wall charger, but that’s about as convenient as unplugging your charger, which people aren’t doing anyway. For another solution Asmo gets around this by using your phone’s battery to power open the relay and get some fresh juice into your phone, meaning the circuit is completely dead when your phone isn’t plugged in.

Relying solely on your phone having battery can cause some problems, so to get around this they’ve also added a button to the charger, allowing you to open the circuit manually when you’re bricked.

Last year ASMO went on Kickstarter where they attempted to raise $70,000 and only brought in just over $32,000 from 533 backers. This year they set the goal posts lower to $10,000 and hit their goal in the first day. So far the team has raised $41,466 by 711 people in the first week. With 25 days left they have a chance at hitting their initial $70,000 goal, which might be a more practical amount of money for manufacturing their chargers in Finland.

Chargers can be picked up for $35, or a wooden covered version by Latsu for $55