In the last week all my orders from China have arrived. According to the tracking #’s, all of them actually arrived in Canada in early May, but were delivered within the last three days of their extended delivery times due to the so called ‘pandemic’. Today is August 1st. Politics is the more likely reason for the delay, but I digress.

Two of those orders were 10 battery holders, and 10 battery TP4056 charger boards for 18650 batteries, which are the type you find in laptop batteries when you take them apart. You can do all sorts of things with these batteries, but only once you have a way to recharge them.

So, thats one example of how useless and wasted can be made useful and vital. As soon as I get a pressure switch for it I will mount it inside a lower kitchen cabinet to illuminate the far reaches when the door opens. Yay!

So, to make this little charger usit, I first had to muck around some just to see if they worked. here’s one attached to the usb port on my laptop.

Red means “charging”, BTW. BTW means ‘by the way’ BTW… I soldered a few up this way, not thinking I would make the move to a proper charger so soon, but I got bored with a blue light pretty quickly.

For that, I took a piece of thin plywood laying about in the garage, cut it 5″x 5″, and mounted everything to it.

There is a bunch of soldering going on there, and I cheated of course, using youtube as a resource –> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoHtxZG7leQ This guy made it look easy, and it really was, I guess. The two wires leading off are for a barrel connector I will install later. This will enable me to attach it directly to a PC power supply, which has the nards to deliver enough current to charge them all simultaneously.

Not much more to say about this than that. Order stuff from China at your own risk. Unless you are Amazon, there is a blockade.