I decided to make something useful with some spare parts I had lying around and actually made up a car charger for my iPod out of them. I use to listen to my music with an iTrip fm transmitter when I’m driving, but you probably know how bad it is when your favorite DAP goes off because of low battery…

Since the iTrip has a mini-usb type of receptacle, it’s easy then to reuse one of the numerous usb to mini-usb cable each of us have for a certain device. Although I write “car charger”, this is not quite a “charger” as we might think. In fact, charging up your DAP is just a matter of supplying proper stabilized voltage on the usb port and the iPod’s internal circuitry will handle battery charging and monitoring. That way, simply mounting a 7805 circuit would do the job.

The only thing you have to care about doing this project is to make sure not messing up with USB pinout. Pin 1 is VCC and pin 4 is GND ! Take a look here for reference http://www.accesscomms.com.au/Reference/USB.htm. If you don’t want to get outside your sweet 127.0.0.1 home to buy a usb receptacle… well look around and desolder ! That’s what I did…

Finally, you have to find an old car charger from which you could take its electronics out to fit yours in its plastic case. Please be careful when testing the charger: you’d better plug a worthless gadget to it first to see if no smoke is coming out.