How To Make Money - As a Teen

Step 3Sell Gadgets To Your Friends

*NOTE* This is different than selling kits. See Step 4 for kits.

If you're reading this, odds are that you are a member of Instructables. This means that you have one of the easiest ways to make money... selling cool gadgets to your friends. You can use your maker skills to build cool things cheaply, and turn a profit selling the things you make. There are some gadgets that are very easy to do this with

The iPod Charger

Think about it. Nearly everyone these days has some device that charges from a USB port. It might be a cell phone, an MP3 player, or even something else altogether. Bottom line, people have a lot of gadgets that burn through a lot of juice. They need to charge their devices.

You can make your own very cheaply to sell to people. The best part is, you can make a very large profit by showing them how much they would pay for a commercial charger. Commercial chargers run between 10 and 50 dollars and some aren't even truly portable, only adapters.

To make a 9V charger you only need a few parts and most of these are easily scrounged from old electronics. You can find USB jacks, LEDs and resistors from old electronics that you don't even have to pay for.

One of the simpler designs for a 9V charger is here. It lists the parts and shows you how to make it. Remember, you don't need to etch a PC board, you can always just solder it together.

Custom Cables

This is another great easy thing to do that also won't cost you too much, if anything at all. Now that you've sold your friends a charger, the cable should be an easy sell. Why should they limit themselves to charging their iPod when they can buy one of your custom cables and charge their phone too?

Making these cables is easy. You just need the two cables that you want to splice together. There are three ways to go about getting these.

1. Get the cables from your friend. You can't charge as much because they're supplying the materials, but you don't have to buy anything.

2. Buy the cables and splice them together. You can go out to your local Best buy, then the Verizon store and get an iPod cable, then a phone cable. Then you splice them together and sell it for twice the price.

3. Buy a specialty cable preassembled. You can get a preassembled specialty cable from my store. I don't mind if you go out and sell it for more to your friends.

The only problem is that you need to know how to construct the cables if you're choosing options 1 or 2. It's really easy. If you'll look at the picture (sorry, I had to get one from the internet. I couldn't cut one apart at the moment) you'll see that a USB cable is composed of 4 wires and most charger cables are composed of 2.

To get to these wires you need to cut the cables in half and strip away a bit of the outer insulation. Then you'll see wires like in the picture. Just wire red (+5V) to red and black (Ground) to black. Then either put electrical tape around it to seal it off and put it back together, or else use heat shrink tubing.

By doing stuff like this you can make a lot of money easily.

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