Hello again everyone and welcome to another tutorial full of fun, excitement, and soldering irons (arns, if you're from Western Pennsylvania).  In this tutorial, I built a Mintyboost.

As you may remember from my Drawdio Tutorial, I found a website devoted to fun little kits which are easy to put together and open source.  The site, Adafruit Industries, has a kit called the Mintyboost.  If you're not familiar with it, it's essentially a USB charger which takes AA batteries.  That's right, with two regular old AA batteries, you can charge almost anything with a USB connector.  In a previous tutorial where I built a Nintendo DS charger, I mentioned that charging via USB could be very handy for your trusty handheld.  This is indeed one of the applications for that cable!  So once again, thank you very much to Adafruit Industries. This kit is amazingly versatile!

You can either follow what I do below or visit their official guide at this website.

So the first thing I did was get the parts out and do a preflight checklist.  Your kit should come in a small silver anti-static bag and have the following components:

1. A battery holder.
2. Some double-sided sticky foam
3. Two bypass capacitors (.1 microfarad)
4. An IC with a socket stuck into a small piece of foam (mine was a LT1302CN8-5)
5. Two resistors (100KOhm, brown-black-yellow-gold) (Go Steelers!)
6. An inductor (22 microhenry +10% variable)
7. Two capacitors (220microfarad/6.3v)
8. A circuit board
9. two other resistors you'll use if you want to use this with older equipment and iPods.
10. A USB 'A' socket
11. A diode (schottky)

If you've got all that, then bust out your soldering iron and helping-hands!

The first thing to do is solder the bypass capacitors.  They have no polarity so they can go in either way.  Just make sure you put them in the right spots

The next thing I did is put the IC's socket in place and solder it, making sure you put it in with the notch matching the silkscreening on the board.  To do this, I used one arm of the helping-hands to hold the socket in place, like this:

Next up is the Schottky.  This diode is not omni-directional, so make sure you put it in right!  The white stripe should match up with the one on the board.

Once you get the diode in there, solder the USB connector to the board.  Like we did with the IC socket above, use one hand of the helping-hands to hold the USB socket flat against the board.  It will snap in, but I wanted to make sure it didn't shift when I flipped it.  Solder the pins as well as the connectors on the side -- they provide extra reinforcement for when you're tugging to get a plug in or out!

Now I did the inductor.

And then the capacitors.  The two caps are like the diode in that they both have polarity.  Make sure they go in the right way!  The longer lead is the positive and goes to the + on the board.  Also, the white stripe down the side of the capacitor is the negative.

After the capacitors were soldered in, I did the resistors.  

Finally, one of the last soldering steps is to put the battery holder's wires in their places.  On the board, the + marks where the RED goes.  the - is for the BLACk.  If you put these in wrong, things might smell bad.

Once you get those in, put the chip into it's rightful place -- the socket.  There's a little notch on the side where the circuit matches the socket.  Make sure you put this in the right direction or else it might damage the boost converter.

Now for the fun.  Put some batteries into the holder.  They might feel warm after a few seconds of being in there.  That's okay!

Using my Nintendo DS USB cable, I plugged one end into the Mintyboost circuit and checked the output voltage with a multimeter.  4.97 volts sounds wonderful, but it's not the 1.21 Gigawatts needed to take us back to 1955.

So now that everything seems to be working correctly, the site recommends you stick it into an Altoids Gum container.  Because I don't chew gum very often, I don't have any of that, but I do have an Altoids container!  Snip a small notch out of it, lay down some electrical tape and foam and keep it in there if you want to...

I had other ideas though.

For my DS, I've always had this handy portable case.  It's got a place for wires and other junk in the back of it, but I rarely carry more than a pair of headphones back there.

If I remember correctly, the case was pretty cheap at Gamestop...about $10 when I picked it up.

 Using a Leatherman, I cut a hole through the side, poking the USB connector through just under the caribbeaner.

But how did I attach the battery pack and USB connector to the case?  Do you even have to ask? :)

And so now we dance.  Get the USB cable, throw some batteries in, and see if it works.

Yes! :D

So that's it!  Now you have a charger for anything USB and you can take it with you anywhere you go.  According to LadyAda's web site, the boost convertor uses very small amounts of power by itself, so you can leave the batteries in it and just plug in whenever you need to.  So when your DS battery is dying and you're in the middle of a good game, don't quit -- just plug in your USB cable and you're good to go!

• Add New
• Search

Comments (0)

Write comment

Your Contact Details:

Name:

Email: do not notifynotify

Website:

Comment:

Title:

UBBCode:         -color-aquablackbluefuchsiagraygreenlimemaroonnavyolivepurpleredsilvertealwhiteyellow -size-tinysmallmediumlargehuge

Message:

Security

Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

Powered by !JoomlaComment 4.0 beta2