Quick & Easy IPod Charger / Portable DC Accessory Jack

by Tumbleweed

17K2216

Intro: Quick & Easy IPod Charger / Portable DC Accessory Jack

This is a S U P E R simple design that will allow you to run many different DC accessories off a simple battery pack.

STEP 1: Obtain the Parts

1 ea - DC Accessory Jack
1 ea - Battery Holder (x8 AA)
1ea - 9V Accessory Lead
8 ea - AA Batteries
1 ea - Velcro Cable Wrap
1 ea - Car iPod Charger (optional)

STEP 2: Make Your Power Connection

I hard-soldered the 9V accessory plug to the DC accessory jack and used a bit of heat shrink to make it look nice. Once you've made a good connection, the jack and cable shouldn't be very much longer than your battery pack.

STEP 3: Put It All Together...

Take the velcro cable wrap and secure the accessory jack to the battery holder... and there you go! Instant portable DC accessory jack.

This jack with my Maxell 12V charger will charge my iPod from dead to fully charged in just under 2 hours. It is also useful for cell phones, pda, PSP, portable DVD player, and most any mp3 player, cd player, or tape player.

17 Comments

PR22 16 years ago

Clever idea. It's one of those things I don't really have a use for, but would keep in my glove box in case the opportunity ever arises where I need a portable 12v DC jack. One idea i just had is to make it work with rechargeable AA batteries and make it so you can run a cable with a diode from your car DC jack to the battery DC jack. Then when the batteries are dead you can recharge it in your car.

Sandisk1duo 15 years ago

the current supplied by your car battery will fry your battery!

PR22 15 years ago

I was under the impression that devices only draw as much current as they need. But you wouldn't want to run 12v straight through the battery. You would drop it to 2 or 3volts and charge it more slowly.

Sandisk1duo 15 years ago

well, do this, drain a ni-cad batttery, so the voltage Stays 0 now take an ohm meter and measure the resistance, you will find it relatively low you car battery can supply 1000A, no problem, your batteries shouldn't be charged with more then 500Ma/h

nerfster 16 years ago

I bought a car power converter so the ciggeret lighters are like the power outlets in your house. do you think you could step it up a bit and and have a portible house outlet in your back pack or somtin?

computerwiz_222 15 years ago

This is cool, but a bit unnecessary... Most 12 volt charges have some sort of step down inside them... So you a re wasting a lot of energy here. You are going from high to low when you can simply go from low to low voltage. Cool idea though! If I saw this in stores, I would probably buy it.

nolan22 16 years ago

awesome instructible

harari 17 years ago

Great !! now i can charge my 4 AA rechargable batteries with my GP PowerBank Travel car charger with ONLY 8 batteries ! ha ha ha ...

Timonosuke 17 years ago

EXCELLENT! The whole project is simple, yet provides a cheap and easily produced way of creating a battery recharger. This IS the solution I've been searching for. Thank you.

radiorental 17 years ago

nice idea. I like the concept of standardising on one connector type be that USB or 12v car lighter and then build your setup around that. So you only need one cable for each device and not seperate USB & car charger & wall charger etc

Dark 17 years ago

Tumbleweed, you came up with a briliant solution. I would probably use this while camping or just to keep in my backback. Also, since you have an output that high, you can use it to charge 3g-5g ipods. I was looking for a similar solution to my problem for those weeks that i'm away from home, so I thank you.

Tumbleweed 17 years ago

Hope you guys find this one useful. I was going to build one of the spiffy Altoids tin iPod chargers, but got to realizing I already had this car adapter just needed a simple hack to make it work....