Paint it black….

This guide really is made for the below average idiot with articles such as ‘how to tell if you’ve done it properly’. If you need help testing it out with a multimeter, you shouldn’t really be doing this.
Anyway… Great article non the less. I think the use of a voltage regulator was well adviced and it would be nice to see everyone elses attempt at this.

It would be even better if piggy-backing was added, so you can just plug the battery pack into another USB device (like a hub) so you can also manipulate the data on the usb device (ipod, phone, etc)

if it’s plugged into a powered hub or computer, isn’t that device going to be providing a charge anyway?

nice writeup, very impressed with your top-quality styrene manipulation. all kinds of pro.

Seems to me that this idea and this general line of products are going to be increasingly more important as our portability increases. What do you all think about a device that could charge anything, maybe using a 12V lead-acid battery like used in UPS power supplies. I think they are 7 Amp-hour. This would be enough to charge a laptop, maybe an ipod, cellphone, etc. Actually though I’m looking at moving everything over to a treo handheld and a powerbook for my portability. So maybe I’ll make something like this for the treo, probably use the national switching regulator though. Any one built a battery system for a powerbook?

A few thoughts in no particular order:

I have a Treo 600, as do several people at my company. It can usually go a full workday of HEAVY use before in danger of needing a recharge. Not sure of the ROI on making an external battery for it, unless you plan to do continuous shoutcase streaming or something.

Lead-acid batteries are HEAVY (ref: the “Lead” portion of their name ;) ). Yes, it’s easy enough to take an alarm battery and use it in this manner, but a 6V cell with a similar AH rating would be ~ 1/2 the weight. That coupled with a low-voltage regulator would be a tad more portable.

Even better might be to look into the “Batcap” line of car audio capacitors. These are like hybrid batteries that can charge faster than a normal battery (more like the almost-instant charging of a traditional cap), but they also seem to hold that charge longer. The idea would be to make a power charging “rig” that when you are near power (AC or 12DC) your portable devices and the batcap all charge, then later you can switch to using the batcap, or other battery, to recharge the portable devices.

I have found that it’s usually not too hard to find an outlet, though. I don’t *personally* think it’s neccessary to carry around a bulk supplemental battery, but I am sure everyones needs are different.

Does the powerbook have removable batteries? Unles you ABSOLUTELY need the continues runtime it would be much easier to just carry a spare battery, this has been my solution with Thinkpads for years…

if i were to use this with a rechargeable battery ho do i charge the battery ? do i just send current to it or doe’s it need a charing circuit ?

First, you would need an exteral recharger Sebastien.

Second scott, noone wants to void their warrenty, or if they lack a warrenty, why risk the powerbook?

Wouldn’t there be a way to halve the 9 volts into a 4.5v charge with twice the wattage going thru the system? Then instead of needing a voltage dropper, and wasting the battery, you just get a small dc-dc stepper to up the 4.5v to 5.0. It would take a little bit of soldering, but it would make charge time double (I think) while not wasting battery power. Or you can just use 3 aa batteries with the stepper, or 4 with the 7805, as 50mw loss isnt that bad.

Anyway, israel torres gave me an idea. A portable, cable-less usb hub power supply for when you need that extra boost to power 4~8 usb flash disks….

As a previous poster indicated, the 7805 will dump the excess voltage as heat.

However, a 7805 is damned cheap and readily available. If you are going to use one, go with 4 AA batteries. That will produce 6 volts, waste less energy as heat and likely provide more run time per battery set anyway.

Referring to post #14 (Ryan): They don’t teach that sort of thing in high school right now as far as I know. There may be some of that multimeter stuff in a few of the voc ed classes, but I’ve been too busy with science, math and English classes to take any sadly. Even if they did, it would only be in maybe one class period of construction trades in our tiny school (note that my high school is really small). Still… I guess high school just isn’t what it used to be. Ironically perhaps, everybody blames “no child left behind”. :)

Very cool project!

I don’t know if it’s worth taking the hit as far as increasing the size of the unit, but it strikes me that it would be very cool to have a rechargeable battery that is maintained automatically while the pack is plugged in to a USB outlet.
That way you also have an excuse for a data pass through as well, so you wouldn’t lose a USB outlet and the battery pack is always ready to go.
One could maintain multiple batteries in an inline arrangement that way too.
One could also leave multiple packs connected for increased running time.

:D

13#
i agree with that, im a student and Most of the How 2 sites and Hax sites use language that is much too advanced for the avarge reader. this article was writen well and explained ALL THE NECCORY DETAIL. Good article gys i will be bulding my own when i can get stuff

ah, I’m retarded and didn’t read the comments.

check out this site for some info on the lm-78xx series voltage regulators.
http://www.southwest.com.au/~jfuller/electronics/regulators.htm
one thing i found interesting was the addition of a diode to protect the regulator from reverse polarity.

Has anyone tested this with an iPod Shuffle yet? I’d like to hear about charge times and the like if anyone has.

I performed this hack and it works fine with my dell dj, first gen. Pretty easy, it was my first time using a soldering iron.

A sweet addon would be to add more than one port, take a USB Huib and add it to that..

going to try this, i can pick up the regulator for $1.20 AUD and the other stuff cheaply, now lets hope the shuffle does not come with an added security measure, eg does not charge unless signaled by the pc its connected thing.

I was wondering something with this project. Apple, as an accessory to the iPod Shuffle sells a 120V – USB adapter to charge the internal battery. What if you used a female-male converter and a rechargable 9V? Could you charge your home-made adapter without ever having to remove the battery?

37. Post
if u are going to put the charger into a box, have u tried using a tin box and connecting the regulator to the tin box with a screw and thermal grease? also add a diode that stop current going the wrong way, might help u not fry the regulator if the terminals on the battery touch the wrong way.

#35, No, it does not require a signal from the computer. No iPod does. No anything that I’ve heard of does.

#41 its kind of weried the results i am getting with the shuffle. it seems that when i plug it into the 9v charger the green light blinks, saying its has power. the battery status light, lights up but does not blink,

but when i put it in the pc, nothing happens until windows picks up that a device is plugged in,

strange.

i got a ps2 slim, when pluged into that it instantly goes into do not pull out mode, eg amber flash. i do not have an u powered usb drive or hub, i do have 8usb ports on my motherboard.

thanks that does the trick :) btw have u ever check how hot the regulator gets?

also u should add a switch so that u can turn the charge on and off, eg have it has a external battery or just a charger.

#46, I’ve drawn up a plan using your circuit in an ALTOIDS tin. Using a USB female connector, I jumpered pins 2, 3 and 4 together (to run only 1 wire, instead of the 3 in your circuit). All other wiring is the same. The ALTOIDS tin will act as a heat sink for the LM7805. By the way, the little hinge is optional. My plan is at:
http://hb.quik.com/~sueh2/iPodShuffleCharger.png

I’ve read in various places lately that a “switched” voltage regulator doesn’t convert the excess voltage to heat. Can anyone confirm this? And if so, point to a product that can be purchased somewhere? I’ve had a hard time finding one for sure online.

The reason I like this idea better than 4AA is that the 9v has a much nicer form factor for a compact case.

I made my charger and made a tin out of mechano for it then i got my suffle, plugged it in and didn’t seem to do any thing, no you NEED to earth the other pins on the usb like in the users posts above or did i just screw up?

Does anyone know of a site supplying the female USB connectors?

I have a 3G Ipod so this will not work cause it doesn’t charge by USB. Do you think if I attached a firewire socket to it instead of a usb socket it would work?

good idea, building my own but I sugest using a bigger box and placing two batterys inside for more power and longer life. Also if anyone knows were to get female usb jacks(a type) in Canada cheap, then please email me at peterdudasca@yahoo.ca

thank you for your help
Peter

G’Day !!!

My hearty congrats for thinking out a marvellous project and presenting it so very very well.

Anyone could make this, thanks to your easy to follow instructions.

It is a pleasure to see the human mind in action and it just goes to show that in the year 2005, not everything has been invented.

Thanks for an intriguing read and for sharing it with myself and others!

I have bookmarked your site and it now occupies a place on my link bar too !

More projects please !!!

http://www.cyg.net.au/

Whats that white board that he hooked it up to at first called?

Wow that ebay auction sold quickly! I bet you could make a killing if you did not put a buy it now thing up! I will hopefully be getting a free Shuffle from Gratis, I only need one more referal, so I am off to go ahead and buy my supplies! thanks

http://www.auburn.edu/~mayhewb

I’ll be putting another charger up as soon as my supplies come in, I’m going to try them a few way- with and with out buy it now. I was surprised at how quickly it sold. esp. since the additions were pretty darn simple.

I found USB female connectors on Mouser.com for $0.35 each. they are part number 154-2742 all I could find were right angle connectors, whatever they worked! It took a week to get them and the rest of my parts for the 10 chargers I made for ebay.

Making one of these was easy but it was 2nd nature by the time I got to number 10.

I’m thinking of setting my roommates into slave labor and manufacturing these in our kitchen!

re #70

I don’t think its possible to the big ipod through usb.

re #68 and others,
It should be possible to use any supply that provides 5v or more. so 3 * 1.5v in series wont work (4.5v) but 4 * 1.5v should (6v)

I bought an iPod Shuffle, which due to a design flaw by Apple doesn’t work terribly well with certain Macs–namely the USB plug is too short to fit into the high-powered USB port and get charged up (luckily you can sync your music on the low-powered port, but the battery slowly dies). Now you could go out and buy a USB extender, but that’s lame and dull, especially if you already have another iPod that comes with a handy wall-charger.

But that charger outputs to Firewire, not USB. So here’s the question– could I solder up a cable that would be Firewire male on one end, and USB female on the other for the express purpose of charging up my shuffle? Pin 1 to Pin 1 for power, and Pin 2 to Pin 4 for ground? It’d be great while on vacation in areas where you don’t have access to USB ports, and you haven’t got around to making a battery-powered USB box…

if you are still looking for a powerbook battery pack here is a homemade one:

http://www.macfreak4.homeunix.com/projects/ibookpwr/index.html

This was an awesome project. with regards to post #8, anyone ideas on connecting the “National Semi switching regulator” to double battery lifetime and gettin rid of excess heat? is this part larger? and how much more would this part cost?

My shuffle is definately happy :)

I just made one with four AA’s. Works NICE! I would definatly reccommend making one. I have a nice case that I made a sliding door with for the usb port. The only problem about the AA’s is size and that isn’t really too big an issue, what I have is about as big as a 20 gb iPod. I havn’t tested battery life but I will tommorow and get back to you guys Thursday.

Sorry about the triple post. Correction to my last post, I just killed my iPod mini with it. I think its cause i used up my iPod battery all the way so it had to be booted by the usb battery… The apple symbol flashed a little and then it showed the low battery sign. Gotta love warranties.

Can i use this same setup but with a different type of connection, other than usb? i have a sanyo 8100 sprint phone that has two different type of connections, one is a regular ac/dc jack for the wall like in cd players, and the other one looks like a usb but might not be. need help please, new to this.

Just built the box and it works well. But it doesn’t seem to charge a 40 gig iPod photo through a usb dock cable. The iPod charges when the usb dock cable is connected to my computer, however.
Has anyone else tried a big iPod with their usb altoid box? Does it charge?

Why even bother with the USB? You could just solder the connector to your phone to the terminals of the circuit you made.

86: I believe the extra 5 pins on the usb might be for programming the onboard chips post-production, i.e. add the bootloader/firmware after constrution of the shuffle since it might be easier, faster, and alot cheaper. It would have nothing to do with the normal operation as standard usb only have the 5 pins (v+, V-, d1, d2, shield).

Someone needs to buy a charger and crack it open then report back.

could i use this cable http://www.frontx.com/cpx506.html to connect between ipod mini firewire port and the LM7805?

benbakelaar (at) gmail.com

well i answered my own questions :) i’m definitely interested in the rechargeable idea but haven’t found anything small enough yet.

So can you use that cable that you linked? Seems like a good thing to use if it works…

mulcbone, yes you can use that cable, overclockers.net has a nice 1394 2×5 pin diagram. however for my purposes (to create a battery for ipod mini) i need to actually have a female 1394 connector attached to the battery…

I’ve made an improved version with a switching voltage regulator and a output indicating LED. All testing were done on a Palm Tungsten E. These are the parts I’ve used.

- 78SR105VC
Fully integrated switching voltage regulator from texas instruments / power trend. By far the most expensive component (US$18). There are other cheaper options (search the national website), but they tend to be much larger or requires external components.

- 1A Schottky diode
This is connected on the input to protect the voltage regulator from reverse current. It won’t tolerate a very high reverse voltage, but with a low voltage drop it should allow slightly more power to be squeezed out of your battery.

- 1uF multilayer ceramic capacitor
I put one each on the input and output of the regulator to reduce the noise. Not sure if I really need it, especially on the input, but it’s cheap and small so why not?

- 4V Blue LED and 2V Zener diode
This is the tricky bit. As the current required by the LED is pretty low, you can connect these two across the 5V output and still get enough current to light the LED. Voltage drop is around 1.7V across the zener, and 3.3V across the LED. When the battery gets flat, the voltage output will start to drop, and the LED will shut off around 4.5V on the output, letting you know it’s time to change a battery.

If you are just using a resistor and an LED, this will not work. The output voltage will have to drop much more before the LED turns off. Your equipment will likely stop drawing current well before that, greatly slowing the rate of voltage drop. It’ll probably be hours from the time your equipment stop charging to the time the LED turns off.

Note that due to the low current, you’ll be working well within the non-linear region of the diodes. It can be quite hard to determine the right combination of LED and zener, and was pretty much trial and error for me.