How-To add a Cigarette Lighter to your PC
This week's HOW-TO Tuesday is more of a journal of finding a solution for two things we wanted to do. The first— we wanted to use some of those car accessories that you plug in to to cigarette lighter in a car, but use them inside our house (we rarely drive now) and the second, add the thing that makes us better than most mammals, the ability to make fire— so this week's HOW-TO is How-To add a car cigarette lighter to your PC, it'll charge your stuff, but this mod won't accelerate your PC, rather— it will only accelerate your death if you use it to smoke up.
A little background…
After 4 years of buying accessories to charge our gadgets in a car, we noticed some gadgets, like our Pharos Bluetooth GPS only had a car charger, since we don't drive that often, we rarely used the GPS— but if we could charge it, keep around to remind us to use it, we would.
So, with that— we started to research, er google, and found a Belkin AC to DC convertor for $29.
Kinda neat, but we thought it would be cool to have one like a car that actually get burning hot, on the occasional chance we want to light up a fine tobacco product. We called the local car junkyard and it looked like we'd need to spend at least $20 on one from junked car, then we'd need to make our own convertor, add to all that, we wanted to put this in our PC. That's when we found exactly what we were looking for…
The 5.25" Cigarette Lighter Panel.
There are manyplaces that sell these as low as $6 up to $20.
The specs…
Face plate pre-assembled
Fits most cases in 5.25" bay
Electric shutdown after 10 to 18 seconds
Charges all the stuff you have in your car
12 VDC
<9A when heating..
We ordered one up, and within a few days it was here. Our PC, a mild mannered HP Pavillion by day, was our subject.
The rest of this How-To is pretty straight forward, if you have a PC with an extra 5.25" bay, this is a really simple mod. A lot of people make some cool PC mods that make their cases look like cars, so this is a nice touch.
The installation…
The kit.
Back of the PC.
Panel off.
Bay out.
Screws hold the bay in place.
Plugging in the power.
Mod in bay.
Light'em up.
Charge'm up.
If you got'em, smoke'em…
And there it is, we've been able charge our phones, a Bluetooth GPS and some other things (like power a XM Satellite Radio inside without using cradle, you normally need to buy that).
And kids, always remember what Penn Jillette said about smoking— you should only smoke if you want to look really, really cool.
Tune in next week, for HOW-TO make your own distiller from a PDA, and a USB cable.
Phillip Torrone can be reached at his personal site, http://www.flashenabled.com and torrone@gmail.com
