Even though he’s a faithful DeWalt cordless tool guy, [Richard Day] admits to a wandering eye in the tool aisle, looking at the Ryobi offerings with impure thoughts. Could he stay true to his brand and stick with his huge stock of yellow tools and batteries, or would he succumb to temptation and add another set of batteries and chargers so he could have access to a few specialty lime green tools?
Luckily, we live in the future, so there’s a third way — building a cross-brand battery adapter that lets him power Ryobi tools with his DeWalt batteries. [Richard]’s solution is a pure hack, as in physically hacking battery packs and forcing them to work and play well together. Mechanically, this was pretty easy — a dead Ryobi pack from the recycling bin at Home Depot was stripped down for its case, which was glued to a Dewalt 20-v to 18-v battery adapter. The tricky part came from dealing with the battery control electronics. Luckily, the donor DeWalt line has that circuitry in the adapter, while Ryobi puts it in the battery. That meant simply transplanting the PCB from the adapter to the Ryobi battery shell would be enough. The video below shows the process and the results — Ryobi tools happily clicking away on DeWalt batteries.
While [Richard] took a somewhat brute-force approach here, we imagine 3D-printed parts might make for a more elegant solution and offer other brand permutations. After all, printing an adapter should be easier than whipping up a cordless battery pack de novo.
Continue reading “Cross-Brand Adapter Makes For Blended Battery Family”
Still, the housing has seen some careful design and attention to detail in its construction. He started with a 3D CAD model from which he created a set of 2D templates to print on paper and from which to cut the wood. As many of his dimensions as possible were taken from common wood stock to save machining time, and the structure was assembled using wood glue before being sanded and filled. Finally, the intricate parts such as the Pokémon logo were 3D printed, and spray painted. The result is a pretty good real-world replica of the Pokémon Center that you’d recognise if you were a player of the original games, and he reports it was a hit with gamers in his local park.
