Here we have a standard thrift store purchase DSi.
Of course that means it doesn't come with a charger.
And I don't trust third party ones very much.
I would rather have a first party, and they're kind of hard to find and slightly more expensive
for what is essentially a 5 volt USB phone charger.
Everyone has a stack of those, they don't have a stack of the DS things.
This adapter also by the way, on the DSi, is separate from a DS or DSLite charger.
Should be, from what I understand, the same as 3DS and 3DSXL or something, but I don't
for certain know that. Anyway!
*intro sting*
I've done the hard work for us, but we will show the process of getting
polarity here.
So if we notice, there are two pins in there, which I have the polarity marked.
Here's essentially the connector, you know you got the plastic over top.
In comes the charger one and it hooks on like this.
But luckily, there are two little tiny holes where the pins that are at the bottom here
have to actually press into to allow some spring.
What that means is we can actually fit these standard...
standard little header cables right in there.
Great, we've got that!
Oh and by the way, this does tell you 4.6 volts DC, but from my understanding they will
happily accept 5 and in my experience it happily accepts 5.
Maybe don't leave it on forever?
I don't know there should be a charging circuit in line, but I can't prove that.
So now that we've got this in there, we need to figure out polarity.
Of course I have it figured out, but you can't easily find it online.
So we'll show my easy method of figuring out polarity.
Usually in most circuits, I can't prove that for all of them, the negative on the power
rail will also be the ground of the rest of the unit.
Headphones have their own little ground cable, so you can easily plug that in, set our meter
to continuity, go to the ground of the headphone and start picking pins.
Of course I grabbed a female header for things we will use later.
So nothing there.
*beep* Dead short.
So the black is our negative here.
So if you look, the black is here, so we put negative there, and the white ended up being
positive, so positive there, and that kind of shows you what the connector is.
I wanted to put it down here, but it made more sense to be able to see it while looking
at it and trying to put the connector in.
So!
Now that you've got this female header, what do you do?
It is my firm belief that everyone should make one of these cables.
Maybe one of the first cables you ever make should be this.
Take some phone charger or something that is otherwise trash, and whack a little standard
.1 inch header on it, because you can use this for everything.
Watch this, here's our breadboard, positive in this one, you should probably mark it in
a better way, because not necessarily red and black will be positive and negative, there
are exceptions, but since positive is red in this one, you just set this right on these
two rails, you have these wires jumping across, this whole breadboard now has power, you can
just stick this in any USB socket or little battery bank.
Here, let's go grab a battery bank!
So assuming you have one of these, all you have to do is hook up power, so red goes to
white, black goes to black, and if this works, by plugging this USB in, we will see the charge
light, whichever one is the charge light.
If I can work USB.
And now it's charging.
Ah!
There's the icon!
So we can see that it is charging from this mess.
There's how to make a DSi charger on a budget!
In fact, it's now portably chargeable.
*Thumbs Up* Even better than the official Nintendo adapter!
Thanks for watching, subscribe, for more tips and teardowns.
*pumpy outro music*