Friday night mini-USB 9V charger

Thanks to Chris Yohe for bringing several potential projects to the shop tonight.
Three new people stopped by to visit and check out the shop, so we picked his
simple soldering project. We had a small group tonight, three members (Chris, Friar, and Doug) and three visitors.

Chris supplied one-time use mini-USB phone chargers and 9v battery clips.
The idea was to remove the fixed/one-use battery and replace it with a 9v clip so the battery could be changed. We cracked the chargers open, removed them from the case, de-soldered the wires connecting the old battery pack, and then soldered on the 9v battery clip.
As Chris put it, its just about the simplest soldering project you could do.

You can see in the photograph that there is a huge blob of solder where the black wire attaches to the circuit board. That wasn’t a bad soldering job on my part… There was so much solder on the mini circuit boards to start with that we didn’t need to use any more when soldering the leads for the 9v clip.

We tested our mod-ed chargers with a 9V battery scrounged from the free battery box and Chris’ old phone. No smoke or sparks, everyone’s project worked!

We didn’t have any way to put the old cases back together. I’m not even sure we’d want to since the idea was to be able to change the battery; we left with a project pretty much as photographed.

I hope our visitors tonight will come back again soon; conveniently enough, there just happens to be a Learn to Solder class on the 18th.