I made an external battery for my Air

cerberusss said:

There's a bunch of them on eBay as well. I have the feeling that the patents aren't expired or something, and these third-parties are flying below the radar for now. For example, DealExtreme used to sell them as well, and these all disappeared overnight from their inventory. All of them.

I've had good experience with a particular seller start of this year, but he's not selling them anymore. Bought about 10 of those cables-with-Magsafe-connector and repaired a bunch of power supplies from which the cable had frayed. The ones from eBay function exactly as the official/regular Apple MagSafe connectors do.

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I don't recall how long its been, but Apple's patent is getting a little old, and I think that Amazon is a little more careful about legalities than eBay is, I dunno, tho. Back around the time this thread began, I could find them here and there in China, but never for very long; I suppose that Apple was pressing the Chinese gov to keep after the patent violators.

I'm hoping that the patent is expired, and that people can get these, of course I also think that Apple should have been selling the repair cords all along...

skinny*k said:

hadaak, you are waaayy in the wrong place; try Google or a Dell or pc forum.

EDIT: FWIW, I wouldn't use a battery to recharge a battery anyway; its inefficient and wastes battery cycles. You'd be much better off just using one, and then the other, to power your laptop. Doing that, not being able to charge from the external battery would be a blessing.

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You can go with a magsafe connector from an airline adapter. The macbook detects this as such and will not charge the internal battery.

I tore apart a magsafe airline adapter and tested this out.

elfxmilhouse said:

You can go with a magsafe connector from an airline adapter. The macbook detects this as such and will not charge the internal battery.

I tore apart a magsafe airline adapter and tested this out.

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That's true, but unfortunately Apple discontinued the airline adapter. Its a shame, I think, because not charging the internal battery from the internal battery is a better choice, but some people will need or want to.

skinny*k said:

Good enough... have fun!

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just so you know
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/notebook-battery-external-power-supply,2821-18.html

Charges Dell Notebooks: The majority of Dell notebooks (excluding the Minis) have a power circuit that requires a proprietary identification signal before charging initiates. If this signal is absent, you can only power the notebook. That is why third-party chargers often do not work with Dell notebooks. Some vendors have figured out Dell’s charging scheme and others haven’t. The only batteries in our roundup that can actually charge a Dell notebook are from Electrovaya and Brunton. Every other battery could not charge our Vostro 3300.


Nice review by the way:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/notebook-battery-external-power-supply,2821.html

hadaak said:

...
Nice review by the way:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/notebook-battery-external-power-supply,2821.html

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That is a nice review, hadaak; there's a lot of useful info there for anyone considering doing this, info that you'd have so spend hours scouring the web to find. Thanks for posting the link.

I ordered this one: Energizer XP18000A. Available in France and has good feedback. I will test it and report back.

http://www.amazon.com/Energizer-XP1...e=UTF8&qid=undefined&sr=1-1&keywords=xp18000A

I also ordered the m3800 power tip :

http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...-dell-precision-m3800-owner-s-review-311.html

I got the external battery and the power tip. just connected it. I had the adaptor warning, clicked the F1 to continue. the system started and was running at 800MHZ
I started ThrottleStop 6. Disabled ProcHot and was back to 3000Mhz and some . I can also adjust the cpu speed by disabling protect and using the multiplier. Will try to get more info on Throttlestop and will also report here about the external battery (energizer xp18000A) runtime.

Throttling on startup 800Mhz:


Throttling disabled through ProcHot disabling:


Cpu clock lowered using the throttlestop multiplier (requires disabling prochot)

First test 3h30mn.

I just need the cable in red in the middle. The one that goes from the two connectors of the battery to the male connector on the end there. Would love it if someone could help me out by making me one, or two

Great idea

Hi,
Your post is actually something I have been trying to do for a long time.
Here's what I have so far.
First let me confess that I am a newbie. I have an i7 mac air as well, and have been trying for ever to find a design to salvage old macbook pro batteries. I mean the thick kind of macbook pro. I was able to pick two up from my friends who gave up on fixing their motherboards, and then at ebay auction. I have about 3 of those batteries, 1 of them is a 15 inch pro type other two are 13 inch types.
I had previously thought that I may need to have some sort of charging control and adapter type thing to wire that up as an external battery. My design was to salvage enough of them together, put them inside a car battery box. solder the charge wire from a mac power supply adapter to quick male female connects and the batteries to other male female connects and maybe, some how, design a charging unit that would charge usb devices as well as the mac, but definitely the mac, so that I would have external batteries, and they would be some what lasting. I mean, I enjoy long drives, and I really don't feel safe sitting next to a rest stop with a new mac air charging. Not so much am I worried about getting robbed, but that I worry getting shot in the process of getting robbed. So, if I gather 6~8 of the batteries, and find a way to modify a charger to charge multiple ones at the same time, and then use them one by one, it would solve my problem.
Thanks,
PS: there seems to be multiple wires to a battery, how do I turn that into a positive and a negative?

So this is what I have to work with

I want to some how make the whole thing reverse able, like being able to connect the macbook pro battery to a connector and then that connector to the charging and discharging device, the travel port already has the positive and negative ports, I can solder female connector and make a moon shaped plastice to recognize the positive and negatives. The USB ports, if possible would be nice, and then there's the small solar panel which if I can use to trickle charge(they are 14v I believe) I have two of those too. I just hope to be able to make additional connection for all pieces so I can wire them all together when I use them in my car, and then maybe take them out as small one to one assembly when I use the battery in my back pack.
Let me know if there's a plan, thanks.

cloylover, there is no practical way to do what you are hoping to do. The charging circuitry on the MacBook batteries is spread over the the input (MagSafe) board, the Motherboard, and the battery circuitry, and the pins on the batteries can’t be ignored. All of this circuitry varies from model to model, and between model years. If you want to use the cells in the batteries, the best way would be to break them down and make up a new battery, using new protection and charging circuitry, with one of the chargers shown above, as shown earlier in the thread. Do that for your backpack battery, and then just use a suitable car charger or inverter in the car.

Chipg said:

Glad to see this thread is still going and has almost 50,000 views. I'm going on 2 1/2 years on my original battery, no problems.

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Glad to see you're still here, Chip. I don't use mine for the Air much, and I use it for other things, so I can't say anything meaningful about it, except that I'm happy with it.

I own a battery this, that will do 12V,16V, 19V o 20V outputs.

Do you guys know if the Macbook Air can handle the 16V input?

Using this cable if the Air could take the 16V input I could use this battery I've been using with my Sony Vaio laptop with the Macbook Air...

bleedinge said:

I own a battery this, that will do 12V,16V, 19V o 20V outputs.

Do you guys know if the Macbook Air can handle the 16V input?

Using this cable if the Air could take the 16V input I could use this battery I've been using with my Sony Vaio laptop with the Macbook Air...

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Assuming that you insure the the plug sizes and polarity are correct, there should be no problem running the MBA at 16V.

skinny*k said:

Assuming that you insure the the plug sizes and polarity are correct, there should be no problem running the MBA at 16V.

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Cool, I was able to salvage, or rather destroy and maybe not so completely ruin one of the MB pro batteries. They are like cell phone batteries, flat and with maybe a lower voltage. If I were to rewire those to between 14v and 16v, would that work? How would I go about charging them then?

I have also destroyed a Mac charger, inside which I found good copper sheets for heat sink, can I cut this copper and use it as conductor link between battery cells?

cloylover said:

Cool, I was able to salvage, or rather destroy and maybe not so completely ruin one of the MB pro batteries. They are like cell phone batteries, flat and with maybe a lower voltage. If I were to rewire those to between 14v and 16v, would that work? How would I go about charging them then?

I have also destroyed a Mac charger, inside which I found good copper sheets for heat sink, can I cut this copper and use it as conductor link between battery cells?

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NO NO NO!!!

The only way for you to re-use those old batteries is to take them apart, disposing of the circuit boards in them, and installing new battery protection circuitry on the cells. The only thing usable from the "charger" is the MagSafe cable; you'll need a new charger like one shown earlier in the thread.

Playing with lithium-ion batteries and cells can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing—they can explode. Read this entire thread, and use Google for research. I suggest that you just buy a battery and proceed the way that Chipg did.

I'm also glad this is keep going! I've made my kit back in 2012 and it's still working great! I've even improved a little bit
Right now I've two LiPo batteries (3000 and 3600mAh), a car charger and the last acquisition: a 12V to 5V 3A double USB converter so I can also charge my iPad mini AND my Samsung Galaxy phone using the batteries!!!

Nice going!



Nice going Monkeyat; its pretty handy, huh?

I think you're right.

skinny*k said:

NO NO NO!!!

The only way for you to re-use those old batteries is to take them apart, disposing of the circuit boards in them, and installing new battery protection circuitry on the cells. The only thing usable from the "charger" is the MagSafe cable; you'll need a new charger like one shown earlier in the thread.

Playing with lithium-ion batteries and cells can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing—they can explode. Read this entire thread, and use Google for research. I suggest that you just buy a battery and proceed the way that Chipg did.

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I started to take them apart.
My project is big, car battery size battery bank when I drive across the nation. I plan to connect 4s batteries running 14.4~14.8v(to be safe) in parallel with charge board, then the charge board to lithium battery charger. inside the car I will connect them all in parallel to a cig lighter plus inverter setup, so I can more effectively draw power at the native speed. I will abandon the self made MagSafe idea since I already have the travel charger, I'll just hookup cig socket to my battery bank with a female connection like one used for the balance charger.
I will have to solder balance charging cables to the batteries cells, each parallel in each 4s battery pack will have 5 wires being 3.6 7.2 10.8 and 14.4. I will be able to charge up to 6 of them at a time running the charger at 6 amps. this will surely cut the charge time down.
I dug up more laptop batteries and harvested some pretty decent 18650 cells, on top of that I took apart 1 13 inch, and 1 15 inch old macbook pro batteries. one pair of cells are some what dead running at 2.6 v in the 15 inch, all other cells are great. I will try to pair another 2 pair of cells from a 15 inch to create my prototype.
If I can somehow create a decent looking casing for my prototype and also figure out a decent priced protection board that supports the native temperature control sensors from the macbook pro batteries, I can reuse a lot of the stuff I pulled off.
Thanks for blocking the reverseable setup idea. I really have no use for the old mac batteries anyways, just thought that the casing was really small.
In fact, if I can figure out what the 9 wires coming out of the mac battery protection board does, I can use one of those as a board.
So far, the only protection board I can reuse right away are these 2s 7.2v boards I harvested off of 2 HP 7.2v batteries. They are 8 cell battery with 4 in parallel, so if I connect those in series I should get my 14.4, and then from the control board it should be pretty simple. Only for soldering balance charging wires it can be tricky.
Any ways, great ideas.
PS: 2 ideas for mobile charging I want to run by you guys, cause all of you seem very smart. 1, I bought a 3 to 1 plus USB outlet cig lighter socket connector, I want to connect 2 small solar panel running at 12v to 2 of the socket and then 1 dual cig cable to the car cig socket and the battery bank, but will this charge the battery at all? being that the car battery is at a lower voltage than the battery bank.
I mean I can surely harvest only 3s and have it all work at 10.8v with minimal customization, but I kinda wanna be safe on some cells failing, as it all inevitably happens. I already bought 20 4s wires, can I use them as 3s wires and abandon the 1 extra wire?
And 2, If I were to abandon temp control protection, and just put them in a modified Rubbermaid icebox, which will protect me from it in case things do go south, will that work for charging? I mean when running I have a vented box I made to sit it in the rear passenger side of my car, and there's always the smart option of draining one battery at a time, so it should be pretty safe, but charging is something I am still weary about.
Let me know, thanks.

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Monkeyat said:

I'm also glad this is keep going! I've made my kit back in 2012 and it's still working great! I've even improved a little bit
Right now I've two LiPo batteries (3000 and 3600mAh), a car charger and the last acquisition: a 12V to 5V 3A double USB converter so I can also charge my iPad mini AND my Samsung Galaxy phone using the batteries!!!

Image

Click to expand...

Wow, so there's a buck connector for the 5v output?
I think I will make 2 connecting cables, one with buck connector for 5v and usb and 1 for cig lighter.
But, I bought this one cig lighter converter that comes with 3 cig socket and 1 usb, will that work by itself?
Let me know, thanks.

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elfxmilhouse said:

You can go with a magsafe connector from an airline adapter. The macbook detects this as such and will not charge the internal battery.

I tore apart a magsafe airline adapter and tested this out.

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I agree, A, charging is not a waste of battery cycles, because if you keep it constantly above 50% with fewer deep drain, you can easily get up to as many as 10 times the cycles as if you were to drain your battery completely. Skinny may be a smart guy, but he's misleading people in thinking lithium ion bats are disposable ones. And two, I too have a travel charger, and it will not charge the internal battery with the external. This is one better function than just the wire from a MagSafe adapter, which I also have.

I have a few more MagSafe adapters I prepared for my project, but I am listing them on ebay as I gave up on that idea.

cloylover, why not just plug the inverter into your car’s lighter socket and go?

Well...

skinny*k said:

cloylover, why not just plug the inverter into your car’s lighter socket and go?

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This kinda goes back to why make computers portable, why use battery at all.
You see, when I go down to the beach, they make me park my car 300 feet away, and a 300 feet extension cable plus leave the car running really doesn't make sense, so if I can unplug one battery pack from my bank of batteries and take out my travel cig socket in a phanny pack(excuse my spelling, I don't actually know how to spell fanny pack.) and be good to go with more or less 5 hours of use out of each brick, that would be my set up.
Thanks for bringing this up though.
PS: I too live in CA where the sun is nice and bright, so the idea of trickle charging off of my two skinny solar plates have always made me grin. I used to do that with my deep cycle batteries, but they don't seem to hold them too well.

I think that your needs exceed my imagination; I can't imagine needing more back-up power than one battery would supply, even if driving cross-country. If you want more, though, go for it.