What is it and who is it for?

I'd like to appropriately frame this because I fear people may get overly excited about the weight and expect all other aspects of the Pad-Pal to be just as impressive. And the last thing I want to do is make my fellow hikers feel like I wasted their money.

The Pad-Pal is a bare bones minimalist electric sleeping pad inflator designed to do about 95% of the work, leaving the last 1-2 puffs for the user to adjust to their desired firmness. The main demographic I had in mind when making these was a UL hiker who wouldn't otherwise consider carrying an electric inflator. I think the type of hikers who are already happy carrying the weight of existing inflators, and love them, may be disappointed by the compromises taken to get the Pad-Pal to sub 10 grams for most pad valves.

So if you're looking for a Zero Pump "killer", this really isn't it. But if you're looking for a super light way to take the hard work out of inflating a sleeping pad after pushing big miles that day, than this thing is through hiker gold :)

How Does it Work?

1. Attach the Pad-Pal to your sleeping pad's inflation valve using a dedicated valve adapter. (Check out the list of compatible pads and the valve adapter guide for more information.)

2. Connect the Pad-Pal to your power bank via USB-C. The Pad-Pal will play a few tones to let you know it's powered up and ready to go.

3. Press the button on the face of the device to select one of four power settings and start inflating your pad. Easy as that!  

Check out this video for a better understanding of how it works.

A Special THANKS!

I'd like to take a moment and recognize 2 people.
The first is Dennis Radermacher of Lightforge.

Dennis is an incredibly talented photographer who is way out of my price or skill range yet still was kind enough to let me use the photos he took while using a Beta version of the Pad-Pal out in NZ. (His photos are the three SUPER nice outdoorsy looking ones, please do not mistake my horrible attempt at an at home studio setup for his own work XD). Thank you Dennis!

The second person is Keith Miller, someone who you should probably thank too if you end up liking the Pad-Pal.
Keith Miller is an insanely talent and interdisciplinary engineer of the likes I have never met before. To top it off, he is also the nicest and most sincere individual I have ever known. It blows my mind such a person exist, even after considering there are 9 billion of us.

Keith first reached out to me at the very beginning of this project 2 years ago suggesting I pursue a brushless variant. I kept waving off his suggestions, then he finally convinced me when he basically showed off his own fully fledged plans for how a brushless variant could be done. We both started working on it right away. Keith went down the route of a custom ESC and I worked in parallel on a board that could trick an off the shelf ESC into doing the job. I figured this double approach would make it more likely at least one of them would work. I got the funky off the shelf + breakout board working first and that was the Beta V5 and V5.1 units. These however had reliability issues and were more time consuming and expensive to make.

Not long after that, Keith got a custom ESC working and showed it was possible. Then in stroke of kindness, and unprompted, he gifted me the schematic so I could start on my own variant of the custom ESC (it somehow still took me another 4 months to get mine working XD). Without Keith's work, I'm pretty sure the Pad-Pal would not be this good or maybe not even be here at all.

Keith is also working on some other epic projects right now that I think the community will absolutely love. Here is a link to his reddit write up of his custom star trackers, be sure to follow his account so you can see what amazing things he might have up his sleeve next! I happen to know what they are and think you will not be disappointed! :)