But if Star Trek has taught us anything, it’s that eventually you’ll need to invert some power.

We got kind of excited when we saw this thing coming through the pipeline. “A power inverter?” we thought, “what kind of fancy futuristic sci-fi gadgetry is this?” “Does it reroute tachyon fields to form a pulse field able to repel Klingon tractor beams?” Then after about 20 minutes of directing a space battle in our heads we snapped back to reality and looked it up.

Turns out you plug it in to a DC power source, like a cigarette lighter in your car or something, and it converts it to AC power so you can use normal electrical plugs on the other side and hook up your appliances and stuff. It’d be pretty nifty for camping, or if you have a flashing neon road sign you keep in your trunk for emergencies or something, but it’s not likely to make a lick of difference on any star ship.

Still, if you were to use it, it’s got Smart Surge Control to prevent burning out whatever stuff you hook it up to, it’s got Voltage Protection so it shuts down if the input voltage ever exceeds 16 volts DC or drops below 9.5 volts DC to protect your battery. It’s even got Overload and Short-Circuit Protection, and a Thermal Cutoff as well. In fact, it’s a little suspicious how much stuff this thing is protected from. We assume without all that safeguarding, these things just explode the second they touch the air.

Anyway, it’s more “humdrum utilitarian device” than “thing I can play with and pretend to be Geordi La Forge,” but we have to guess even the most diehard Wooter will appreciate the occasional item that’s actually useful. And we won’t judge if every time you hook it up you give your best Captain’s order to engineering to invert the power.

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