12v cigarette lighter style in USB power charge adapter

Phreedom Karess

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Nov 15, 2015, 4:40:42 AM11/15/15

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cheap thing bought at dollar store, at home used used a wallwart 12vdc with a cig lighter style attach, worked fine for year, then i accidentally managed to short the 5vdc output during a quick kludge on a project. now this cheap little thing started putting out 7.6 vdc rather than 5vdc, unbeknownst to me. long story short, i then used it to try charge one of those 'recharge your cell phone' portable batterys. and it toasted it, no more blue light showing charge or redlight showing it is charging. of course, it would, wrong input voltage! dumb eh? i figured there would be some sort of minimal input protection on the battery thing, boy was i wrong. take this little cheap thing apart, inside is a fuse to protect (whatever?) itself from over load, a resistor, a small millihenry inductor and a 6 pin chip that does 'all the work'. (oh and a red l.e.d. to show the output is on). nothing looks remotely cooked or smelled like usual toasted electronics, must be all internally fused or opened? amazing how cheap it was built, gotta give them chinese credit, they know how to slap these things out by the millions and never give a dang about failure modes or protecting dumb end users! ;-))

best way to 'repair' these cheap little things is to go to the dollar store and get another one.

c4urs11

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Nov 15, 2015, 9:35:28 AM11/15/15

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On Sun, 15 Nov 2015 01:40:36 -0800, Phreedom Karess wrote:
> best way to 'repair' these cheap little things is to go to the dollar store
> and get another one.

Dollar store got your money for the first one and now you are willing to
give them money again for the same cheap thing?
Nice way to slap dollar store for selling this in the first place.

"Them chinese" are perfectly able to produce a decent charger, but at a price
dollar store wouldn't make the same profit on.

Cheers!

Jeff Liebermann

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Nov 15, 2015, 12:26:34 PM11/15/15

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On Sun, 15 Nov 2015 01:40:36 -0800 (PST), Phreedom Karess
<hap...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

>best way to 'repair' these cheap little things is to go to the dollar store and get another one.

I bought a bunch of those last year and gave them away with Christmas
presents to various friends. Then, I took one apart and noticed how
they were thrown together and how the sense wires on the USB connector
were shorted together making it a "universal charger". When I put a
1A load on it, and looked at the noisy output, I declared them to be
junk. I had to drive around to the recipients and confiscate my gifts
before the chargers blew up a phone or whatever.

I think you'll find these to be suitable replacements and yes, they do
cost more money:
<http://www.amazon.com/PowerGen-charger-Designed-Android-Devices/dp/B0088U6OZY>
<http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/Powergen%20USB%20car%20charger/Powergen%20USB%20car%20charger.jpg>
<http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/Powergen%20USB%20car%20charger/Powergen%20insde.jpg>
Incidentally, the "A" means "Apple", and the "NA" means "Not Apple".

--
Jeff Liebermann je...@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558