DIY USB iPod Car Charger

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.