Many of you probably have an extra USB car charger laying around the house, right? You know, one that probably came free with some gadget that you never even use anymore. As you may already know, one of the things that it can’t charge is your iPhone. Or can it?
After a couple weeks of tinkering, the crafty bunch over at tzywen, have found a simple way to make that USB car charger “iPhone ready”. The reason that a normal USB car charger wouldn’t work for the iPhone already, is that the engineers at Apple have designed the device’s electronics to look for the standard USB D+ and D- lines, omitted by the majority of USB chargers.
With a few resistors, some wire cutting and soldering, you can add these lines by tricking the reference voltages. If your feeling a bit Macguyver-ish today, try out the resistor formula below.
Additionally, with a few other tweaks you can adapt this hack to work on high-capacity batteries, that’ll let you charge your iPhone from nearly any outlet around the world.
