Solution needed to power multi-devices in car

[Guest petec500]

Hi,

Since i've started using Navizon, with two phones and two external GPS devices, i'm having a hard time keeping up with charging them all. In the car, i have just the one cigarette lighter socket, so i can only charge one at a time.

I've seen cigarette light socket expanders that give you two or three sockets from one, but they're bulky. Then, i started to think about a simple USB hub as all my devices have a USB charge socket. Do you reckon this would work?

Any other ideas for this?

[Guest tsutton]

Yeah, that should work. But it depends on how strong your car battery is outputting and sharing it out to devices.

[Guest Dr_StrangeTrick]

Depends on if its your car or a company car and if you dont mind a bit of soldering and getting behind your dash?

[Guest petec500]

It's a company car, but i was thinking of getting behind the dash and hard-wiring something - i've done a fair bit of wiring in the past.

[Guest Dr_StrangeTrick]

Hi again, I used this

The total cost of all the components costs less than 80p at Maplins and it took around 3mins to solder, the most expensive part was a small case to house it :)

I have this wired to my ignition feed and this powers a BT GPS, I use a Holux GPSlim 236 as its a SiRF III and instead of a 'soft' push on/off it has a good old fashioned mechanical slide switch.

So this is in a corner of my glovebox with the switch set to on and the battery removed with an external antenna so as soon as I turn the key my GPS in on and when I turn the engine off the GPS goes off and I dont have to worry about the battery. Also with the external antenna I always get maximum reception a full 12 out of 12 satellites and the bars are always at the top :D

I also have a mini usb feed from the same power supply to power my device.

The power supply is small and more importantly its a regulated 5v and it can handle up to 1A so thats more than enough for most things :D

Hope this helps

[Guest petec500]

That's really neat and exactly what i need. Think i'll give this a go.

One more question for you - i keep meaning to look it up, but you'll probably know. On a mini-USB connector, which pins are +5V and 0V? I assume they're the outer two, but i dont know which is which.

[Guest Dr_StrangeTrick]

Ohh, got me now :) cant remember

Did a quick search and we have...

http://gsmhosting.com/vbb/archive/index.php/t-305805.html

I remembered why I cant remember :D I had a dodgy car charger and I cut the lead off that and used that instead :D

[Guest petec500]

Thanks again. From a bit of experimentation, there appears to be two standards of mini-USB chargers. For instance, the charger for my Touch wont charge my wife's RAZR or my Blackberry, but the reverse does. Also, my GPSlim236 wont work whilst charging with one type of charger but will with another. I can only think the RAZR/Blackberry/GPSlim type chargers hold one of the serial lines high to signify that it can accept a charge, where as the other type (Touch) doesn't.

I'll do some more research on this.

[Guest Dr_StrangeTrick]

I've also got the GPSSlim 236 and whatever you do DO NOT put the SPV type mini-usb into the GPS as it will blow, I know I've found out the hard way.

The GPS should work from a straight mini-usb while your device will need to hold the serial line (as described in previous link)