Ryobi USB Power Supply

Last crawled date: 4 years, 4 months ago

If you're like us, you live in an area with occasional power outages (darned above-ground power lines!). In a situation like that, if you have some power tool batteries on-hand, it's handy to be able to keep your cell phone alive in the interim.
I've got a number of Ryobi power tools using One+ 18V batteries (and unlike my USB batteries, the Ryobi batteries are always charged), so since Ryobi no longer sells a USB charger, I made my own. You'll need some contacts (AAA battery contacts, you can use these from Mouser, or these from Digikey), and a USB socket that can handle either 12V or 24V input -- like this one on Amazon.
A bit of simple soldering later, and you're done.
This comes in two parts -- a bottom plate, and a top (tower) piece. Glue them together with cyanoacrylate glue ("super glue") or epoxy. I remixed both from this excellent starting point.