Phone Charger for bike.

[obsolete]

I've been using the droid as a GPS (kinda) for the bike and was wondering if anyone has found a good way to hard wire mini-usb as opposed to using a lighter converter and thena phone charger line. A quick connect near the seat mid line would be key too. Am I going to have to make this or is there a compnay I can't find doing it.

[RyanNicholson]

I went to radio shack and bought a cig lighter jack and wired it into my tail section... works well to just charge my phone on longer rides with a regular car charger. I can't imagine it would be hard to wire something up.

[Jim]

alex, i have one in my bike. very easy to set up. i can show you sometime what it looks like on my bike if you're interested

[obsolete]

That's what I wanted to move away from. I'd rather have a mini usb directly wired so I can run it right to the phone. But thanks for the help guys.

[Jim]

ya sorry. i have what Ryan's got on my bike. if you need a hand with whatever you end up getting, let me know.

[island boyeee]

yea i was looking to wire up a 12V USB charger as well. initially i was gonna use my power inverter and the AC charger, but that's too much crap.

[obsolete]

How are the GPS units powered? direct line?

[drop]

http://www.powerletproducts.com/

powerlet carries direct wire mini-USB cables, along with all kinds of other quick connect sockets/plugs/mounts.

[obsolete]

Boomshakalaka Jamie is the man.

Any sites run by Suzuki people though, you BMW folk double the price of everything. lol

[island boyeee]

i think i'm gonna buy something like this: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.15618

then just break the cigarette plug open, and wire it directly to the battery. then i can run the cord under the tank and up to the mount

[obsolete]

i think i'm gonna buy something like this: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.15618

then just break the cigarette plug open, and wire it directly to the battery. then i can run the cord under the tank and up to the mount

That was my other plan, but how will that work with bike voltage and what not and which wire should be the power and which the ground?

[drop]

That was my other plan, but how will that work with bike voltage and what not and which wire should be the power and which the ground?

it'll work fine with no voltage issues if you grab the wires right at the contacts inside the charger's plug.

the wire that goes to the center pin on cigarette lighter plugs is always positive, and the one going to the ring is ground.

[island boyeee]

^ beat me to it. one normally has a fuse as well (obviously the positive)

[landricscustoms]

if you have the car plug usb charger i can hard wire it for you. pm me if interested

[obsolete]

No shit. This may work out ok lol.

[island boyeee]

yep. i did the same thing with an old DVD player for my car that only required 12V input. just cut off the AC adapter and wired it straight to the car.

gonna do the same with my new Seagate media player.

[obsolete]

I'm planning on doing for a mount for the car to to hard wire in the charger and audio output.

[RyanNicholson]

yea busting open the plug and hard wiring the wires was kinda what I was leading to when I said wiring it up should be pretty easy. I was going to do that but I figured I could just bring my car charger with me if I wired up the outlet, instead of buying another one.

[ssg]

Just fyi...your Droid is running microusb not miniusb, just in case you use anything other than a regular plug-in charger.

I would recommend if you do this (hardwiring a regular car charger) I would do it with an OEM charger unit as they typically have the best power conditioning circuits over the other generic units.

[island boyeee]

except if you're hard wiring it, you will lose whatever circuitry they may include...

[Subee13]

Alex you all set? If not you have a few options of what you can do. I may even have parts if you needed them.

[ssg]

except if you're hard wiring it, you will lose whatever circuitry they may include...

If you do the hack and slash using only the wiring portions - yes, but you could just as easily make use of it right?

I'm no electronics wiz, I just know the crap is in there for a reason and my Droid cost about three times what my GPS did and I'm sure it's more sensitive to surge/lag.

[obsolete]

Not if I keep the circut and just use the outer most leads.

[island boyeee]

you might be surprised to open up the OEM unit and find there's nothing more in there than a fuse as well...

[ssg]

you might be surprised to open up the OEM unit and find there's nothing more in there than a fuse as well...

Maybe true in some cases. I have an OEM Droid charger split in half on the desk in front of me, it has a few IC's a bigass coil, some diodes, capacitor, etc. multi layer board with some SMT and thru-hole stuff on it.

Unfortunately for Obsolete, the cord was jacked from this one long ago for a project similar to his. I've just had this thing hanging around for no reason...I knew there was a reason I didn't throw it away