Inside the shell I soldered small diodes to the pins, going by taking apart and ringing out a pair of TI Wired Remote Pinky Pinchers*, to make dual sticks work correctly. I used the insertable pin style connector and superglued a trapezoid of wood into the middle to make two sockets. There’s room to plug two molded DE9 joystick plugs into a DB25 side by side. Years ago I built a dual 2600 to TI-99 joystick adapter into a DB25 connector and shell. Fortunately the 12V shunt on the drive shunted (permanently) instead of blowing open. The internal USB to SATA adapter survived because it has a *very robust* 12 to 5 volt circuit and passes that protection on to the drive’s 5V input. For shame, Dymo! Also shame on Western Digital for providing zero protection on the 12V line in their MyBook hard drives. The “best” barrel jack trick I have was accidentally discovering that my Dymo LabelWriter 400 Turbo that takes 24VDC uses exactly the same connector as the vast majority of 12VDC devices. Speaking of prolonged shorts through clamp diodes, for those of you too young or insufficiently clumsy to have had the experience, watching your MCU turn into an incandescent lamp through the windowed CERDIP package produced an indescribable blend of awe and terror (and a strong incentive to knock off for lunch as that chip package will take a good while to cool). The downside is that you do have to be careful not to reverse the polarity when you don’t mean to since most devices get unhappy with prolonged shorts through their clamp diodes). As a bonus careful swizzling can allow polarity reversal for those rare but annoying devices that buck the ring-negative tip-positive convention. a pair of 100mill header pins on the power recipient end and matching header socket on the power supplying end) along with color coded heat shrink and then encapsulate the whole mess in a larger clear heatshrink tube with internal adhesive. I’ve also been known to chop the plug end off my wall-warts and ubiquitous cheap USB power cables put some other connector pair in the middle (e.g. Posted in hardware Tagged barrel connector, cobbled, function over fashion, function over form, functional, protoboard, solder, ugly Post navigation What’s your barrel connector trick and does it work reliably? The inside is contacted by thick copper wire with a kink to again provide spring action. hack is actually quite respectable! It appears to be a roll of copper (perhaps from tubing?) bent for a bit of spring tension on the outside of the barrel.

If you can’t take the easy route of cutting off the connectors, what’s your go-to trick? Alligator clips are a horrid approach, and there aren’t really any clear winners that come to mind. Everyone has a box of old wall warts somewhere, exhibiting a wide range of barrel connector sizes. There is no link, aka screen-capped the image exchange and reminded us on the tip line.Ĭhances are you’ve faced this problem yourself. Necessity birthed the most straightforward solution which did not involve shredding a power adapter’s plug. In one of our Hack Chats, shared a couple of images wherein a barrel connector was needed, but there was no time to wait for one in the mail. Then there are the times where you need to throw scraps of copper at a prototyping board and strangle nine-volts out by any means necessary. A simple device, on a custom circuit board with inexpensive parts that will disrupt the status quo and make you a billion dollars in no time. When placed in a 2.5 mm ID plug the toothpick is loose and will fall out when tipped.Sometimes you get an epiphany for a project that will change the world. If you slide this into the end of a 2.1 mm ID plug it will be snug and would not fall out when tipped up. Most round toothpicks are manufactured to be between 2.1 and 2.2 mm in diameter. Please make sure the power supply is de-energized before trying any of these methods. You can buy one and get an Adapter (2.1 to 2.5, or 2.5 to 2.1) in case you buy the wrong one, or there are a couple tricks that can help identify which size you have. Since this measurement is too close to use a ruler and fitting a caliper (if available) inside a 2.1 or 2.5 mm hole is very difficult to do accurately. This is made more difficult by the fact that the two most common sizes of plugs at 2.1 mm ID x 5.5 mm OD and 2.5 mm ID x 5.5 mm OD. The difficult specification to find on many of these power supplies is what size if the inner diameter of the plug / connector. One common question that is asked of Techs at Digi-Key is to trying to verify the correct replacement wall mount AC to DC power supply.

Barrel connector