Found @ CRASH Space No. 1: Apple – Arduino Power Supply

I’m not sure how many of you remember the Take Apart Tuesday series, but with my crash-space-meta-duties lightened I want to get back to highlighting the interesting and weird flotsam and jetsam that washes up on our door step. This time I wanted to focus on neat things to do with the items instead of just the orgy of dismantlement with the carcasses hauled to APEX in the end.

This week: Making a 12.5V (ish) power supply to use with an Arduino from parts I found during the monthly clean up in the pile under the bench in the front room. None of these items are particularly weird, but I’ve just seen a lot of these forlorn white bricks lately. I want them to feel loved again.   It turns out to be a 12.8V supply according to the multimeter I used. That will actually make an Arduino run a little hot, but it’ll work.

Parts Used

• Car charger with appropriate plug on the end(Found in donations pile, 2.1mm center positive)
• Firewire 400 cable (Found in donations pile… there were many)
• Apple Firewire charger (missing cable, Found in donations pile)
• Heatshrink (Found in drawer in back corner left of the door)

Tools:

• Wire stripper (“Sharp” drawer in metal cabinet on top of benched in Lab One)
• Heat gun (Hanging from shelves above same bench)
• Helping Hands and Soldering Iron (same bench)
• Multimeter (actually mine – from All Electronics bought it purely to fit in my purse.)

Other Options for these Items

• Could have kept the car charger intact and used it for a data logger in my car so I don’t have to remember to write down mileage when I use my car for a gig.
• Could have made a crochet chain bracelet with the cables (I tried to with the left over Firewire cable but didn’t quite have enough to make it work)

I took more pictures of the process of making the adapter and put more notes on them.  I only had my terrible phone camera fully charged and ready to go this morning. Next time I’ll be ready.

Other Ideas?