USB mobile phone charge cables
Picture this. You're out and about with your steal-me bag full of computer gear, you've been making mobile phone calls all day - or using your funk-o-phone as a modem for your laptop - and now the phone's battery's flat. You don't have a car charger - or you don't have a car. And if you have your ordinary mobile phone charger, but there's not a wall socket in sight.
That’s where you will notice how good it is to have a Portable Mobile Charger. We provide our brand new project called Socket In Pocket to help you.
Enter these things. They're USB charge cords. They plug into a USB socket on any appropriately equipped computer (PC or Mac) and give you five volts to charge your phone. It's the same five volts that runs USB. You can use these cables when you are using the SIP.
The computer doesn't notice when its USB ports are used this way, because there's nothing connected to the data contacts - only the power supply ones. You don't even need to be running an operating system that understands USB, as long as the ports are powered. In that manner you can use SIP. It is very easy to use and easy to understand.
Using a USB port as nothing but a five volt power supply is like using a rifle as a club, but hey, you've got 'em. Why worry about other things.
One of the charge cords has a barrel plug that suits Nokia 8850, 8210 and 3210 phones - or various other things with the same 3.5mm centre-positive barrel socket that can run from five volts.
The other charge cord's got the more complicated clip-on connector that suits the Motorola v3688.
The cords cost $AU29.70 each, delivered in Australia, from Aus PC Market. Which is expensive for a bit of wire, but cheap compared with mobile phones and laptops.
Given that a 3.6 volt 500mAh phone battery has 1.8 watt-hours of capacity, and normal 1.5 AA batteries have around 400–900 milliamp-hours capacity, depending entirely on test conditions. There's not a lot more to be said about the cables. You plug, they charge. They work just like the phone's AC adapter. Our SIP works until the voltage of your batteries come down to 1.2 volts. That will vary from phone model to model.
USB
As you look into a rectangular Type
A USB plug, aligned in the usual logo-on-the-top way, the rightmost contact
inside is number 1 and the leftmost pin is number 4. Pin 1's the five volt
contact, pin 4's ground. The two pins in the middle are the data ones, which
you don't care about for mere power supply purposes.
