How to Make an All-in-One Charger

When you plan an outing with your family, you usually end up carting along all your portable handheld chargers for your devices. But what if you are on a family picnic and you only have a single power point or plug point where you can charge only one device at a given time? For example, let’s pick a scenario where you own a Blackberry, your wife owns a Nokia, your son has an HTC while your daughter uses her iPod and Sony Ericsson. Now you have a single power point for charging the devices and you can't seem to decide who gets to charge their device first. What do you do in such a case? Wouldn’t it be nice if all of you could charge your phones at the same time?

Here is a simple workshop where you can use any old mobile charger and convert it into a multi-charger which can charge more than one device at the same time. All you need is an old charger (preferably a 1 A or a 1.2 A charger), a few mobile cables (depending on the mobile handset type) and some insulating tape. The mobile charging cables are easily available in the local market for Rs 10 – Rs 25 each. Usually these cables are convertors which transform a basic Nokia mobile charger’s connector into the respective handset charging pin. Buy the ones you would need for the respective handsets.

Your main charger should be of either 1 or 1.2 A

Step 1
To begin with, simply cut off the cables leaving around six inches from the main handset connector end (not the end which connects to the charger). Now strip each cable sleeve by a few centimeters and peel the insulating plastic which will reveal the copper wires from within.

Twisting the copper wires of the cables

Step 2
Now this is the main tricky part—each cable would/should have a different color for each wire within the cable. Usually they would be red and black. The red would be the positive and the black would be the negative terminal. If you are not sure, or have different colors, you can use a multi-meter to find out the correct terminals. Also peel the wires that come out from the charger.

Different connectors for your all-in-one charger

Step 3
Once all the wires are stripped to reveal their cores, it is time to join all the red wires or positive terminals together and the same with the negative terminals. You can simply twist all the exposed copper wires around each other. Once done, carefully and neatly seal each of these joints with insulating tape.

And Finally
That’s it. You now have a multi-charger in less than Rs 100. Try connecting them to the respective handsets and checking if they are charging. If not, you would need to check if the connections are correct and reverse them wherever necessary. You can take some help from a friend who has a bit of electronics knowledge.

Note: Though you can charge multiple handsets with a single charger, the time of charging will depend completely on two factors—the power rating of the charger itself and the power requirement of the device being charged. For example, if your charger has an output power rating of 1 A, then you can either charge a single device which requires 1 A or two devices which require 500 mA. You can still charge up to three or four devices in this case, but the charging time will be longer than usual. Also note that this charger will be only valid for handheld devices which require 5 volts.

Note: Check your equipment power ratings before you decide to do this workshop. We take no responsibility towards any damage caused to life or property by referring to this workshop. Try this workshop at your own risk.