350350

So my old Valentine One is the only thing in my car that still has the old 'cigarette lighter' power supply plug.

I run the phone with Trapster on roadtrips and that display burns the phone battery down pretty quickly. USB charger.

GPS would use the USB if it was available.

Always have the camera wherever I'm trippin to so that could charge on the USB too if I had it.

Barring a $7 Wal-Mart adapter that goes in the cigarette lighter plug to convert to USB charge ports, I was thinking it would be nice to just put in a bank of USB ports under the dash or something?

Surely someone else is way ahead of me on this?

97FormulaWS-6

The cheapy $7 walmart USB cigarette ones are what everyone really uses. I personally haven't seen anything else rigged up. I have seen people tear them apart and hard-wire them with a switch into their cars. (Which I'm going to do to my jeep shortly with 2 of the $3 ones I got from parts-express.com).

350350

So lemme ask this, I have an old USB 4-port hub laying around that has an AC adapter to power it. Is there any reason I can't just mount the hub under the dash, and wire the power to the battery +/- ? Meaning, is 12 volts too much? That's all the cigarette lighter ones do, right? There's no stepdown of voltage or amperage?

L.dookie

it should work just fine. i would put it on a fused circuit though. or wire it to the battery and get an inline fuse holder. you could splice into the power wire for the accessory plug. and by a/c adapter you do mean a plug for a cigarette lighter right?

350350

Actually, I meant an old USB hub I used with my computer, but it's from the days when they had their own power source. So, it's a 4-port USB hub I used with my computer printer/mouse/keyboard/etc, but it has a 5-volt power supply that runs on house current. So I thought I'd just cut the wall plug off it and wire the cord to 12-volt power in the car.

97FormulaWS-6

It's a step-down. The hub may have it inside, or it maybe part of the wall adapter.

The car is 12V; USB is 5V; gotta drop it down somewhere.

What you're wanting to do should work; assuming the input to the hub is a 12VDC input (Therefore the drop to 5V for the USB is inside the hub). If the input to the USB hub is 5VDC, then you'd need a voltage regulator to get it down to 5V. This can be done a few ways, but nothing as easy as plug-n-play; you'd essentially have to find or make a 5V regulator, that could output 2 amps. (I say 2 amps, because you have a 4 port hub, and most USB power ports are rated at 1/2 amp (4 x .5A = 2A)).

Once you're into this much work, it's still do-able; but the plug-in ones are going to be cheaper/easier to hack.