Tool

Bike-powered phone charger

This workshop came directly from the MAKE ZINE tutorial “Pedal Power Phone Charger“. In the instructions below, we detail what we learned to help people who want to organize this as a group activity.

Many of us were first-time solderers, and with a quick viewing of some soldering basics videos, we were able to get started. See links in the sidebar to the tutorials that we used. All parts are available at Radio Shack and item numbers are conveniently included at MAKE. Groups of 2-3 people are great for this project.

Give yourself a few weeks to order parts from Radio Shack. We made 7 units and it was not possible to get 7 of everything we needed at one store location, and some items are only available online.

This tutorial only works for non-iPhones, so make sure you have the right phones available for testing.

Grommets and ring tongues come in packs with varying sizes, so you won’t need 7 bags for 7 units, but you need more than one because there are only a certain amount of the size you need in each bag.

Before snipping the adaptaplug cable in half, think about where you want to mount the charger on the bike. You may want more cable in between the generator and the unit than from the unit to the phone.

Think about what you will do with the chargers after they are made if some participants are doing the project just to learn how, but don’t have a bike or don’t own the right kind of phone. Can they be raffled off to raise money for a good local cause?

Watching soldering tutorials was very helpful, and making sure we had new, clean solder was key

Bike-powered phone charger

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