ichthuz Posted January 15, 2007 Share Posted January 15, 2007 the other day these awesome headphones of mine got slept on and i broke them. the speakers still worked so i removed the bridge and mounted them in a little box. i can now plug the iPod into them and use them as speakers. now what i want to do is be able to mount a generic ipod dock with stereo out and USB out and DC out and be able to make the ipod play from that. the problem is I'll need a power source . is there a way i can jury rig a l-ion battery from an old laptop to power a DC powered ipod dock? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moonlit Posted January 15, 2007 Share Posted January 15, 2007 Providing you have a way to charge that battery there's no reason why not. Bear in mind though that laptop batteries hold a lot of juice so you don't wanna go wrong connecting it up. Laptop batteries aren't very tolerant of being shorted so be very careful about checking and double checking your connections and/or circuits before you connect the battery. You'll also find that the laptop battery will pump out more juice than your circuit requires. You'll need a small circuit to cut down the voltage coming from the battery otherwise your iPod's gonna go boom. This should be a simple case of a few resistors but check out the voltage of the battery and figure out which resistors you'll need to cut the power down enough for an iPod. There are many tools on the internet that can help you calculate these resistor values. I'm assuming you just want to run the iPod from it but you could also integrate a small stereo amplifier circuit, perhaps steal one from an old pair of PC speakers. The reason I say this is because a laptop battery could be anything from about 10v to 14v, even the 10v battery is much more juice than you'll need for an iPod assuming it requires 5v, though I'm not sure about the requirements of an iPod, you may as well add a small amplifier. A possible layout could be a voltage divider (or potential divider). This would allow you to give 5v for the iPod (you might wish to use a 5v voltage regulator to give the iPod a steady supply) and the remaining voltage could be used to power the amplifier. ______________________________ | | | | [ ] [#] | [ ] Resistor 1 [o] iPod o + | | Battery |______________| o - | | | [ ] [ ] Amp | [ ] Resistor 2 | |_____________|_______________| My electronics knowledge is shaky, but that should to the trick, you just gotta work out the resistor values according to the battery's voltage. Edit: Thinking about it, this would be real easy to add switches to so you could turn off the iPod or the mplifier individually, so you could use it as an iPod charger on moment then decide you need to use the amp on a personal CD player, for instance or someone else's non-iPod MP3 player the next, so in essense the amplifier and iPod are completely seperate, yet being in the same package can be integrated by simply plugging in the amplifier and switching both devices on. ______________________________ | | Switch Switch [ ] | | [ ] Resistor 1 [#] o + | [o] iPod Battery |______________| o - | Switch | [ ] | | [ ] Resistor 2 [ ] Amp |_____________|_______________| Again this should work but before building anything do a little research and maybe get a second opinion on this. I'm not responsible for anything exploding! ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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