All-in-one Charger
You don’t need to lug around all your chargers when you’re heading out. We show you how you can make your own multi-charger using an old one.
BY FRANCIS D'SA
When you’re packing before a business trip or holiday, you usually end up carrying along chargers for all your portable devices. But what if you find yourself in a situation where you only have a single power socket, where you can charge only one device at a time? For example, let’s pick a scenario where you own a Blackberry, your wife owns a Nokia phone, your son has his HTC phone, while your daughter has her iPod. Now, you only have a single power point to charge these devices, and everyone’s fighting to be the first to charge their device. What do you do in such a case? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could charge all the phones and iPods at the same time?
In this simple workshop, we will show you a concept on how you can convert any old mobile phone charger into a multi-device charger, which can charge more than one device at a time. All you need is an old charger (preferably a 1 A or a 1.2 A charger), a few mobile cables (depending on the mobile handset type), and some insulating tape. The mobile charging cables are easily available in the local market for Rs 10–25 each. Usually, these cables are convertors, which transform a basic Nokia mobile charger’s connector into the respective handset’s charging pin. Buy the ones you would need for the respective handsets.
To begin, cut off the cables leaving around six inches from the main handset connector end (not the end which connects to the charger). Strip each cable sleeve by a few centimeters and peal the insulating plastic which will reveal the copper wires within. Now, this is the tricky part—each cable would/should have a different color for each wire within the cable. Usually they would be red and black. The red would be the positive and the black would be the negative terminal. If you are not sure, or have different colors, you can use a multi-meter to find out the correct terminals. Peel the wires that come out from the charger too.
Once all the wires are stripped to reveal their cores, it is time to join all the red wires or positive terminals together. Do the same with all the negative terminals. You can simply twist all the exposed copper wires around each other. Once done, carefully and neatly seal each of these joints with insulating tape. That’s it. You now have a multi-charger in less than Rs 100. Try connecting them to the respective handsets and checking if they are charging. If not, you would need to check if the connections are correct and fix them wherever necessary. You can take some help from a friend who has a bit of electronics knowledge.
Note: Though you can charge multiple handsets with a single charger, the time of charging will depend on two factors—the power rating of the charger itself and the power requirement of the device being charged. For example, if your charger has an output power rating of 1 A, then you can either charge a single device which requires 1 A or two devices which require 500 mA. You can still charge up to three or four devices in this case, but the charging time will be longer than usual. Also note that this charger will be only valid for handheld devices that require 5 volts.
Check your equipment power ratings before you decide to undertake this workshop, and try this at your own risk.
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