Solar charger for macbook air Pc#

Does it work? Yes.īut hey, sometimes that’s the price you pay for progress.įundamentally, working with proprietary connectors can be a real pain. It gets the odd stare here and there, because at the end of the day, there’s a pistachio sticking out of the charge port. The pistachio nut encasement proved to be a worthwhile solution, giving the connector much needed robustness after being stripped down and rebuilt. A quick tidy up with a file and all was good to go. After a longer wait then expected due to the fact I’d accidentally purchased the 24-hour, not 5 minute, epoxy, it was cured. It was difficult to hold the connector in position within the shell if I were to attack this problem again, I’d have tacked the connector in place with superglue before filling the shell with epoxy.

The Magsafe was placed inside and the shell was filled with epoxy to hold everything together and insulate the wires. A pistachio shell would serve quite well as the protective outer case for the connector. Have you ever tried to open a pistachio nut that isn’t yawning open along the seams? It impossible for mere mortals to do without tools. I decided to fashion a new protective cover for the connector, and as luck would have it, I had the perfect parts to hand. This, combined with the now-exposed wires, meant something had to be done. While the charger was functional, it was difficult to insert and remove since the aluminium casing had been removed. There was now just one small problem to fix. Be sure to avoid getting any glue on the spring contacts this is an easy way to ruin the connector permanently. Aw, Nuts! Filling the shell with epoxy is a delicate process. A few checks with the multimeter against the pinout indicated everything was connected correctly, and plugging the charger back into the Macbook indicated the repair was successful. After cleaning up the solder tabs of the connector, I freshly stripped the charger wiring and soldered everything back into place.

This explained the symptoms we were seeing, so I was confident that I’d found the root cause. The issue was that after many years of use, the continual flexing of the cable had caused the shielding strands to break over time, eventually making poor or no contact. The center conductor is soldered to one tab which connects to the V+ pins of the Magsafe connector, and the shield connected to the other tab, leading to GND. The cable of the Macbook charger consisted of a centre conductor sheathed in Teflon, which was then surrounded by two layers of shield wound in opposite directions. After much consternation, I had the connector peeled back and was able to identify the problem. A Dremel would have been the perfect tool for the job, actually, but I persevered regardless. I began to strip away the metal shell around the back of the connector with my sidecutters, and eventually an angle grinder. Replacement parts simply aren’t available - a common problem with proprietary connectors. It’s at this point with any other charger that you get out your trusty sidecutters, lop the end off, and tap away at Digikey to get a replacement part on the way. The soft metal is fairly easy to cut with hand tools. Sidecutters weren’t the best tool for the job, but they’re what I had lying around. This led me to suspect an intermittent connection was the culprit, and it was quite a poor one at that the high resistance leading to the heat issue. The other, was that even when it would charge, the connector would become very hot. The first was that the charger would only function if the cable was held just so, in exactly the right orientation. However, it’s not the easiest to fix. When the charger began failing, I noticed two symptoms. This connector has many benefits, such as quick release in the event someone trips over the cable, and the fact that it can be plugged in without regard to orientation.

Solar charger for macbook air Pc#

Unlike most PC manufacturers, who rely on the humble barrel jack and its readily available variants, Apple liked to use the Magsafe connector on its Macbook line. Such was the case when I found myself face to face with a failed Macbook charger, and figured it’d be a simple fix. It’s usually the connector that goes first. Combine this with fairly lightweight design and it’s not uncommon for a laptop charger to fail after a few years. They’re repeatedly plugged and unplugged, coiled up, stuffed into bags, thrown around, and just generally treated fairly poorly.