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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."
Why would I cary around such an ugly thing? I'd rather just buy a 2nd iPod.
explaining your stack of batteries when it shows up on the x-ray at an airport. ;)
...by dissecting your iPod, why not buy this ?
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
Advantages
Not compatible with iPod mini.
straight quote.
This article is how to build your own Belkin battery pack for cheap.
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Naughty naughty, you didn't read the article did you
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
We want solar iPod now!
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.
THIS IS NOT SAFE!
There are 2 x 1.5 volt cells in series
And 2 x 9 volt cells in parallel
I know for certain this causes heat problems during charging or discharging because of the charge inbalance between the cells.
This could lead to explosions in extreem cases.
If you need to build one, I would suggest removing one of the 9 volt cells or adding 2 more 1.5 volt cells in parallel
I still get 12 hours of play out of an old CD player(11 years old), from too AA batteries. I havent seen anything recently which managed this.
All the recent CD players I have seen last 4 hours but have 1 Meg buffers, 2x read speed, feature, feature etc.
I'm sticking with my old CD player, It works as I want and has the only features I need (long battery life).
Because for 7 hours you have 10,000 songs to pick from to listen to.
But I agree. I think that for example, the cast-benefit ratio is better for buying a cd-player that play's mp3-cd's than a HD-based player right now.
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.
Buy a 40-hour iPod battery for $100 bucks.
That's Right. 40
I have been using an old Sony MD player for quite a while. On one (count 'em, ONE) AA battery I routinely get about 30-35 hours playback at moderate volume. I have never used any music player that even comes close to this.
Wouldn't it be better to use the rechargable batteries you can buy at BestBuy or Target instead of burning up those AAs and 9vs for 10 hrs of play time?
6 pin Firewire pin assignment (& others)
;)
Need to know which ones are the power pins, right?
Anonymous Joe
on the downside, they currently have no remote and cant work as a USB harddrive without the use of additional software. fortunately, rio are constantly updating the player with new features, and are in the process of making it work as a usb harddrive.
Minidiscs are alright (i own a sony N10 [top model]). It depends what you like though. They do have great battery life, but this is at the expensive of the amp.. so thanks to their weak amps, the sound quality isn't great. they're really good for the average joe, who (shock horror) uses the stock earbuds, and is happy with things like 128kbps mp3.. but as a music fan the weak amp annoys me (which is why i'm buying a karma, and have just built a portable amp)
more recent sony discmen (discmans?) have insane battery life as do the md players, at least in the higher end units. my old discman could get 50+ hours on a pair of AA and my minidisc player gets 30+hours on one AA easy.
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.
Instead, either use two 4-way AA cell holders in series with non-rechargeable cells(for a total of 12V), which are available from most electronics distributors, or a combination of 2 and 4 way holders to allow the use of 10 NiCd or NiMH AA or AAA cells - also for a total of 12V since these cells run about 1.2V each. With a diode and a resistor you can trickle charge this arrangement through a car lighter plug, since car batteries run around 14.5V. It's a kludge but a feasible kludge.
I wonder if anyone has looked at modifying the works of a Freeplay radio (wind up dynamo) to act as a charger for small appliances like iPods?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
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.
Backup battery pack
LotD
I'm assuming he chose this configuration because a 9V will discharge faster at a given current than a AA.
He chose this configuration only because he was trying to be clever and fit it into a playing-card pack.
As to what you're assuming - no. Battery voltage is determined by the chemical type of the battery. Size doesn't matter. So for example, standard alkaline AA, AAA, C, and D batteries all put out 1.5V, but Ni-Cads put out 1.2V. Lead-acid like your car battery is 2V.
Therefore, a 9V battery is just six tiny 1.5V batteries in series. Get some tin snips or whatever, and carefully cut open the outer casing on a 9V and you can see for yourself.
Also, you *can* safely run batteries in parallel. The only gotcha is that you can run into problems if you try to charge the batteries in that configuration when they are not evenly discharged. His picture looks like he isn't using rechargeable batteries, though. Or if you had rechargeables, you could pop the batteries out and charge them individually.
Personally I think it'd be more straightforward to just wire up 8 AAA batteries in series and forget the 9V nonsense. Probably would get longer battery life too. I don't know if they'd fit in a playing-card pack, but they wouldn't be much larger.
I'm just curious; where do you listen to your iPod or any music player for that matter 7 hours a row? Traveling maybe? I'm quite sure you would able to use external power source part of that time.
Personally I can't get up to 7 hours a day even if I listen every moment I can.
And would people please stop to post these iPod battery stories? The whole is has become highly exaggerated.
I demand the Cone of Silence!
Since I found it difficult to research how to upgrade and repair such electronic devices, I have setup pages with links to HOWTOs for portable music players, laptops and notebooks as well as PDAs. BTW: there is a also a selecion of Linux tools to connect to portable MP3 players.
1) Different battery types will lead to different discharge rates... in other words, when a battery is flat, you have to take them all out and test individually.
/. has sunk to? I mean, there's got to be funnier or cleverer stuff than this out there.
2) The circuit is hardly clever or novel; no lights to tell you when the batteries are reading the end of their useful life.
3) Gluing plastic on cardboard.... does this pass for elegent or clever? If so, let me show you some really "clever" things I've done with a fanbelt at 3 AM to keep my car going.
4) is this was
If you are going to do all that, why not put a car battery in a backpack and put a voltage regulator on it? The best point of the iPod is that it is sleek and slender, now what have you just done when you 'add' a battery?
If the cost of a longer battery life is a larger unit, then I'd rather not have one. If I need more battery life, there's always the Belkin Battery Pack ($59.99 from the Apple store) which delivers an extra 12-15 hours of charge.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
While he obviously didn't RTFA, on the other hand, the existence of an external ipod battery pack with LEDs to indicate the charge, a secure (by which they seem to mean locking) on/off switch and a suction-cup mount is something I did not know about before, so I'd call him informative and misinformed, simultaneously.
However, 70 bucks seems kind of steep for that thing. I'm sure you could make one with all or most of its functions and that looked as good for a lot less.
Or if you just want to go on the cheap yet have something sturdier than a playing card box, got a snap-together travel soap carrier and make an ipod battery pack out of that instead. It will take a little more effort and skill to mount the firewire plug in it, but it will last a long time.
You could make this battery pack rechargable and have an even 12V output using two 9.6V Maha Powerex
batteries and two regular NiMH batteries.
I recently flew from LA to Melbourne, a brutal 14 hour flight. I turned on my 1st gen iPod immediately after we left LA, and, much to my surprise, it kept working until our approach in Australia. Yes, I didn't skip around very much, and I'm sure that helped battery life. But 14 hours of non-stop playback is 14-hours of playback.
I know I am just a geeky physisist by education :-), can anybody tell me what in the world was the reason to use two 9V and two 1,5V cells and connect them in a funny way, when one could just take eight AAA cells. 8x1,5V=12V bingo!
...
That will be even cheaper. And would last longer. And will fit into cardbox as well. And
...a stunned silence fell upon the hall.
Batteries in parallel (like those 9Vs) are bad, mixing battery types in series (such as AA and 9V in series), or even in brand (different brands of AA batteries) is very bad. If you're going to build this project, use 8 AA batteries in a simple series, unless you like having a pocket full of battery acid.
Where do you find the time to listen to music when you are on the phone that much?
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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 built it with a Firewire cable with a female end that I cut in half and taped to a 9V clip, then I attached the 9V clip to an 8 battery pack. It didn't need any soldering, and it should last about 20 hours. I've determined that it can be stored in either a cornflakes box or a neoprene case; a hard case would probably work too. It's pretty cool.
I thought of going the 9V route, but then it occurred to me that it's kinda pointless to have two 9Vs - 9Vs don't hold that much charge; their main benefit is that they're small. They're actually 6 tiny (and therefore inefficient) 1.5V cells in parallel. So there is no purpose in having two.
To be blunt, this design isn't so bright... Sure, it produces a reasonable voltage, but it's not a good idea to mix different types / sizes of battery in this way. If batteries are mixed in parallel like the PP3 batteries in this circuit, large currents may flow from one of the batteries to the other - it's unlikely both batteries would output exactly the same voltage. If batteries of different sizes are mixed in series, one type may discharge before the other. The discharged cell may potentially be reversed - i.e. current will flow through it backwards. Either of these situations may cause the batteries to vent gas, overheat, or if safeguards fail they may even potentially explode. This is the sort of thing that you may get away with for some of the time, and you may not see any problems immediately - but in the long term you may well burn your house down. This advice comes from experience. If you short a rechargeable battery you can draw extremely high currents (even 10s of amps) and start fires very quickly. I once melted a long piece of plastic insulation very quickly when two contacts touched at the end of a battery lead. The battery got very hot - I burned my fingers trying to disconnect it. Treat batteries with respect. I'd be willing to wager that electronics kills many more people through fire than electrocution.
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.
Those batteries are going to be eaten like candy... It would be much smarter to put together a lithium ion polymer pack and just recharge it... Stick 6 1Ah LI-P cells in the same amount of space, (2*3 arrangement) and you get your nice nominal ~11V with a hell of a lot more duration (2Ah) than alkalines, and a lot less cost. The cells will run you maybe $15 each, and will last for hundreds of charges.
It's obviously not the work of a professional engineer, but that's what makes it neat. Taking a just barely functional knowledge of what's going on and solving a problem using available tools. I suspect this guy isn't going to be the professional EE you all think he should be for at least 4 more years
Actually, I've seen a lot of EEs do the same thing, with no more understanding than the basic voltage drop analysis. You have to keep in mind that an engineering degree confers exactly the *opposite* thing to the practical knowledge required in the real world. Those people who make good engineers already got their practical knowledge from playing with Lego and hacking their bicycle.
You see, the reason why a D cell is bigger than a C cell is bigger than a AA cell is bigger than a AAA cell despite all putting out ~1.5V is because of current capacity. A modern D cell will put out 1.5V into a 1A load for many (~15) hours, while a modern AAA cell will put out 1.5V into a 1A load for around an hour and ten minutes.
Trivia question: why is there AA, AAA, C and D but no A or B? Answer: The A battery was a big 1.5V lantern battery used to heat the filaments in radios before rectifier tubes were practical to allow the radio to be plugged in to a regular outlet, and the B battery was a 30V, 45V or 90V battery used to provide the plate voltages for the tubes in these radios. The B battery stuck around until the early transistor radios of the late 1950s replaced all the tube portables. You can actually still buy both battery types but generally only through big electronic parts suppliers.
(Quoting Duracell's alkaline battery data sheets, difficult to link directly to the PDF so click on "Technical Bulletin" and scroll to page 9/13, D cell 15Ah (15,000mAh) and AAA cell 1.15Ah (1,150mAh).)
Go to Radio Shack and buy a multimeter. Stick it in current mode, and measure the current consumed by the iPod. Then look up the mAh (milliamp-hour) ratings for the type of battery you wish to use - NiMH, Energizer Lithium, Duracells, whatever. Do not mix battery types (brands, chemistries, etc), ages (new batteries and old batteries should never be put together in series), or sizes (AA, 9V, D-cells, etc.) because you will have some discharge faster than others, sometimes to the point of actually trying to "recharge" the weakest cells off the strongest cells.
Figure out which battery size you need to use based on whatever you consider to be an acceptable battery life for long trips, and use it. Of course, there will be design trade-offs in order to achieve a reasonable size - shorter battery life or bigger and heavier batteries - some compromise will probably have to be reached. If all you care about is battery life, for example, just stick the iPod directly across a car battery.
Get appropriate sized battery holders at Radio Shack or any number of electronic parts places - MCM Electronics, All Electronics, Digikey, Newark, Electrosonic, etc. Connect them in series and build them into a plastic or aluminum box, properly secured and screwed down. Use heat shrink tubing instead of electrical tape for all connections, and use a grommet (those little plastic things where the power cord enters your kettle or toaster or whatever) to prevent the wires getting frayed.
And, most importantly, once you know the current the iPod consumes, multiply that number by two and buy a fuse with that rating. Put it in a holder in the battery box - that way, if the power cord to the iPod gets caught and damaged, or if the iPod fails catastrophically - there won't be a fire.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
An inexpensive homebrew iPod battery sounds way cool! However, just to clarify something...
Actually, there ARE car chargers for the iPod, and they're only $20:l
http://www.xtrememac.com/foripod/car_charger.shtm
Apple even sells the newer model at The Apple Store.
the JoshMeister on Security