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Build Your Own iPod Battery
OmniVector writes "With various complaints about the iPod battery's life, and its mere 10-8 hours of charge many of us are left looking for a way to keep the tunes kicking a little longer. Drew Perry has come up with a novel solution which can only run you a few bucks for an extra 10 hours of battery life out of a box of playing cards and a everyday batteries. Not bad for that long car trip where you just don't have a firewire charger handy."
That's pretty slick. Now just stick the batteries in something nice and shinny that will go beter with iPod's sexy design, and we're cooking with fire.
Buckethead
More like 4-7 hours on the third generation iPod if you skip tracks frequently and don't listen in a continuous block.
Which is why I returned mine. Apple were forced to acknowledge that their claims about battery life may have been misleading when I showed them the Australian Trade Practices Act sections about misleading and deceptive conduct.
My 2 cents: buy a minidisc player. Better battery life, physically tougher, smaller. What's the point of having 10,000 songs if you can only listen to 7 hours worth in a sitting?
Read Pynchon.
placing two cells in parallel can mean that one will discharge through the other - a stack of 6 or 8 AA cells in series would be better
Seems to me that should the battery deal go wrong, the card box is very conducive to fire.. fire on batteries... box go boom?
That's me being paranoid, but I recently heard of a colo facility destroyed - burned to the ground - by exploding batteries.
Well, with a NetMD minidisc recorder it takes a few minutes to transfer whatever you want onto a minidisc. I can live with that. Furthermore, it will play for around 30 hours on an AA battery, so if you take half an hour to organise a few LP MDs you're set for days of music.
Read Pynchon.
As I do, if you've ever taken it apart you'll notice there is quite a bit of space left in there. The battery is quite thin. I've often wondered if you could just buy another battery from say www.ipodbattery.com and install it internally, coupled in parallel with the original one. (same voltage, twice the capacity) Any EE's could verify if this would work?
Yes, have second thoughts! I'm not proposing that iPods stink or anything of the sort, but if you are like me, i.e. serious about listening to a lot of music rather than looking at a shiny white thing, then iPod may not be the ideal solution. I am on the move a lot, and for me an average of 6 hours playback was just never going to cut it.
With NetMD, using Sony's (admittedly pretty shite) software you can easily transfer MP3s onto minidiscs in no time. The program takes your MP3, converts it into a (seperate) MD-formatted audio file, then copies it via USB to the MD player. By ripping and maintaining your own MP3s outside the Sony software managing your music is pretty straightforward.
Minidisc uses ATRAC, see here: http://www.minidisc.org/aes_atrac.html
Read Pynchon.
Good point :-)
Could leave it on the window sill next time you have a power cut though. Sorry, don't live in the states, didn't mean to be insesitive!
Solar chargers always seem like top ideas though. Small panel, top of rucksack, just to keep topping up whatever, hell it would just work a radio, but just to streach the life of an iPod to an hour or so more? Might just make a day out then? If it's sunny enough.
Tracker.
Contrary to popular belief, airport security personnel aren't exactly smart.
Two recent examples for you:
1. A passenger from Germany who was stopped and detained for having wires protruding from her jacket. It was nothing more than an ordinary electric jacket as used by bikers for the last twenty-odd years but that didn't stop the security guys from treating the passenger like a terrorist.
An example of them getting it wrong by going overboard.
2. A Sudanese man who was stopped at Heathrow with five live bullets in his coat. The man had just travelled from Washington DC, and the fact that someone was carrying live ammunition onto an aircraft was totally missed by the security in DC. So, security at Washington is so tight that you can get munitions onto a transatlantic aircraft without being spotted.
An example of them getting it wrong by making basic mistakes.
Remember, these are the people who insist on everything going through an x-ray machine, even materials that are highly sensitive to rays and easily damaged, because they know best and because the machines are "harmless".
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Then they just waved me through.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The first problem with the battery pack is that it is grossly unbalanced. He shows alkaline batteries in it, so let's cruise on over to www.energizer.com and get some specs. A 9V Energizer has 625mah while AA Energizers have 2850mah capacity. Parallel the two 9V and you are only up to 1250mah, which means that the two 9V batteries will be dead before the AA cells are even half of the way used up.
Next, he is using expensive and environmentally harmful alkaline batteries rather than NiMH rechargeables. According to the EPA, Americans throw away 2 billion non-rechargeable batteries per year -- almost all of which end up in landfills. The single largest source of mercury in garbage is alkaline and button cell batteries. He took an iPod that had a battery pack that could be recharged for about a year and a half and made an alkaline pack that has to be thrown away every ten hours! It's projects like the one described here that make me think that the feds should ban all non-rechargeable batteries bigger than button cells.
Since the iPod would run on anything from 8-30V, he would have been a lot smarter to use 8 AA NiMH batteries in a case like this or this.
Nothing wrong with parallel connections as long as you charge them either conservatively or intelligently. Note the final design shown in this article actually shows primary cells. Firstly they're nominally non-rechargable, secondly their internal resistance prevents any thought-provoking excursions in the temperature and noise domains.
Anecdotal evidence at best. Answer me this question smartie:
..."
How many thousands and millions of times did Airport Security Personnel accurately spot and identify a battery/electronic posession of a passenger and determine that it was in fact safe?
Just because you've 'heard of this in the news' doesn't mean that your analytical powers are sufficient to accurately determine reality in a scenario you've had no direct experience with. You're not looking at the entire scene here: count the success as well as the failure and then compare.
Personally, I've known quite a few very intelligent security people, and had no problems with them whatsoever.
Your two anecdotes prove your argument, though. Sharp...
Remember, these are the people who insist on everything going through an x-ray machine, even materials that are highly sensitive to rays and easily damaged, because they know best and because the machines are "harmless".
"I'll ignore the fact that most 'x-ray machines' installed at major airports are in fact far more than 'x-ray devices' and do more than just 'x-ray' things, and imply that because those passengers (such as myself) are so smart, they're bringing super-sensitive materials with them through the airport security screeners, who are all sooooo stoooopid
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
On a flight from LA to San Francisco I recently took all i was taking was my rucksack as hand luggage, in it was my digital camera, a 12-pack of Duracell batteries with only eight still in the packet, four being in my camera, and my iPod and a few other bits and bobs.
My bag got flagged by the security staff and so first I was ordered to sit down in some waiting area type place while they swabbed my bag (I presume for trace explosives or something) and put it through the scanner again.
I was then given a pat-down body search, my shoes had to be taken off, put through the scanner and then swabbed, my bag was then taken away by one of the staff and I was told to wait while they tested that the batteries were actually batteries or something. I wasn't told, just ordered to sit and wait.
So after 30mins of my time wasted they decided to let me go on my merry way. What really got on my nerves is that there were no 'please' or 'thankyous' uttered by any of them, I felt as if I had done something wrong or was being treated badly just for having batteries in my bag.
Excellent! I'll wait for integrated cold fusion battery for iPod. Then I'll be arrested for some form of an atomic weapons violation.
BTW, did you know that sending zalmiak candies from the EU to the US is quite difficult? Zalmiak is ammonium chloride so it's made of ammonia and chlorine which are hazardous chemicals. I know a Finnish girl who tried to send zalmiak to her friend in the US. The clerk at local post office said that sending zalmiak to the US is not possible without a specific licence. Nice! One more terrorist girl stopped again!
Some (non-rechargeable) batteries also contain ammonium chloride so maybe it is equally difficult to send batteries to the US. Or maybe Apple iPod loaded with these batteries is a diabolic doom device! MWAHAHAHAHAA!
I'll give you an opportunity to go into more detail about those "extreem inbalances".
I'll bite: just to explain the problem with connecting batteries in parallel:
The 9v batteries in parallel have the same nominal voltage, but almost inevitably will slightly differ in actual voltage. The difference voltage tends to drive current around the circuit composed of the two batteries in parallel. There is only very low impedance in that circuit if the batteries are reasonably new and full of charge.
As a result, the idle circulating currents can build up to high values and cause heat dissipation problems, perhaps damaging the batteries and severely limiting the useful life of the arrangement.
Since the whole point is to get longer life, that looks a bit self-defeating.
A simple solution is to include a series diode with each battery. The loss of about 0.5v overall will not be appreciable because of the wide iPod voltage tolerance.
-wb-
One thing i have yet to see anyone use... if its rated for 8 - 30 volts use 2 7.2v RC racing packs in series those things were designed for Horrendous discharge rates ive used them on older notebooks with great success i figure an ipod would run for upwards of 40 hours on a pair of good sanyos
I wonder if it would be possible to make something like this external pack using an actual ipod battery (available at several online stores). Put it in a small project box of some sort with a firewire port on it and maybe some sort of led/light/whatever to indicate if it is charged.
Solar iPod? You'd need about $150 in solar cells just to make the damn thing spin it's HD up. And then there's the logistics problem of the device not having enough surface area, so you'd need to put a huge adapter on it (goodbye small and portable)...
I tried this idea already... thought I could make millions... instead I wasted $150... ugh.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
I don't see anywhere in the article which pins on the firewire socket one has to connect to pos & neg from the batteries. I'd want to be real sure I got that right before plugging a gizmo like this into my iPod.
On second thoughts, I suppose all it takes to discover this is a multimeter and the Apple charger.
Still, it would be a nice addition to the article if he would explain that.
I'm an X-ray tech. Batteries and bombs look completely different.
Bomb material is generally much less dense than battery contents, for example. Plastic explosives have signature densities, and are displayed using a red tone on the monitor. It's funny, because meat has a desnity very close to that of plastic explosive, so it's highlighted red as well.
Batteries, made of lead are displayed black. They block x-rays very well--there's no mistaking batteries for any explosive material; unless they packed some of the batteries with PE, and lead-lined them. In which case you couldn't tell the difference, except that the PE batteries would have extra wires going to them.
If you want to make a tech nervous, get a steak (no bone), a couple batteries, a PCB with random components on it, and run a couple leads over to the steak, and use 14-ga amphenol pins as probes into the steak. that'll get you a strip search, with the possibility of a free prostate exam.
I'm still waiting for plans for a homemade Belkin battery pack.
The difference?
The belkin packs, as you may have noticed, use only 4x1.5V. They don't charge the iPod battery, they power the iPod, getting 15-20 more hours of playtime, a better solution to me. This is probably done by jumping a pin in the proprietary dock connector of the iPod.
If someone could figure out which pin to jump or otherwise how to make this, it would be a wonderful solution.
Hmmm. A poster further up said he thought the ipod used a 78L05
linear regulator (or some equivalent) and from what i've been
reading I tend to agree. It would certainly seem to explain the
ipods rather crappy power management. These linear regulators
have a quiescent current in the order of milliamps which is just
dumb (in this day and age) for a battery powered device. It is
however cheap, which is presumably why apple went this way (if they
did) rather than opt for a more efficient micropower regulator with
microamp quiescent current draw. Perhaps they should've farmed out
the electronics to SONY and just stuck to designing the enclosure.
siggy played guitar
Have you actually tried to request this?
Last year, I tried requesting a hand inspection of a box of floppy disks, because I was afraid of possible X-ray damage (they were about 20 year-old 5.25" disks with programs that it would be hard to replace these days.) The security person said "sorry, we can't do that. Put it through the machine or you can't take it on the plane."
I decided to not start a fight over this, since I don't relish the idea of being arrested 3000 miles from home. I consider myself lucky that the disks didn't get damaged.