Laptop Power Brick Adaptor for Your LiPo Balance Charger

When I travel for both work and leisure, I bring all of my FPV drones and gear as well as my laptop and of course its charger/power brick. For those into FPV/RC, the options for chargers is either a big, heavy charger that has its own integrated AC supply that you can just plug into a wall outlet, or you have to lug around a big old, heavy power supply (in my case, it was a repurposed old laptop power brick replaced with an XT60 connector at the end).

Since I always have my laptop with me, I thought I could manage to save several hundred grams by just using one power brick for both!

Warning: Take note what voltage your power brick outputs by reading its sticker label. It should say something like "Output DC 19V" or something like that. Most modern balance chargers can take anywhere from 7-30V like mine, but older ones might not like anything over 12V.

Supplies

• XT60 connector
• DC 7.4mm barrel connector

Tools

• Wire cutters
• Soldering iron (the one I use is a TS-100. Highly recommended!)
• Heat shrink

First, obviously what kind of connector you need would depend on what charger you have. In my case, my Dell laptop has a 7.4mm barrel connector (which I figured out by measuring and Googling). You can get just the barrel connector socket, but I like the ones that already come with wires, and in my case I got one where the other end is another kind of connector that I can put in my bin and maybe use in another project in the future. But in terms of this project, we really need only the one end that fits over your specific power brick.

You will then need to strip the black wire back a little bit, revealing a thinner black and red wire inside. Strip this wire also.

Now we take our XT60 connector (assuming your balance charger, like most of them, takes an XT60 connector), and place it somewhere stable. If you have some helping hands, they work great. Otherwise, some BluTac also works great for holding it in place. Slip on a piece of heat shrink tube (around 1-2cm length should be ok) over the connector we prepared in Step 1. Take the red wire and solder it on the positive of the XT60 (the flat side is the positive; refer to the photo). Take the black wire and solder it on the negative of the XT60. Slide the heat shrink over the connector to insulate it and shrink it with a blow dryer or heat gun.

That's it! You're all done! All that's left to do is to plug the adapter you just made to your power brick then plug it into your balance charger. So when you're not working on your laptop, you can then start having fun and use that same power brick to charge up all your drone's LiPo batteries!

Have fun with this quick tutorial, keep building, and keep flying! :)