The making of iPod Nano (home-made) charger

After approx. 3 hours of testing and soldering together different combinations, I’ve succeded to make an 230VAC/5VDC charger for my wife’s iPod Nano (third generation). And it was not as simple as it may sound. Owners of iPod Nano do have an USB cable for connecting their players to Macs or PCs, but connecting this cable into an standard 230VAC/5VDC USB charger does not do the magic for Nano. The problem is that you have to trick the player so it thinks it is connected to a USB port on Mac or PC.

I was pretty sure I was not the first one who tried to do this, so I did some Google searching. As you can see, I’ve found a lot of manuals, but they were mostly all for older Nano models and none of them worked for my wife’s third generation Nano. Then I found this topic on ModMyIfone forum where user iBlade described how to make an iPhone charger. He also posted some pictures and circuit schematics. Considering the fact that iPhone came at at the same time as third generation Nano’s and knowing that Apple does thing by the KISS principle, I thought to give it a try.

So once again I did some soldering. This time using iBlade circuit schematic. Here is it, along side some of my soldering photos.

As you probably already concluded from the last photo, this time I was successful. The home-made iPod Nano charger works. The trick was in using two 470ohm resistors (I’ve actually used 500ohm resistors), which you must connect between +5V DC and USB 2 and 3 data pins (check out this USB pinout link), according to upper schematic.

— Regards, Milan