Building your own bluetooth speaker - powering two 5V devices with one USB lead

[German_John]

Hey everyone,

 

I'm pretty new to tinkering with electronics, so this is probably a really easy issue (but I didn't know how to google for it).

I salvaged some old laptop speakers and bought a little amp board for it. I also have an old bluetooth receiver. Both take 5V.

I ALSO have a few old battery banks that I can easily salvage to power it, but it'd be great if I could power everything off of a single cable. 

Basically, I want to be able to plug in the battery bank and then power two devices off of it (the thing only has ONE USB out, sadly. How would I go about that?

I can solder a little bit, so would it be possible to somehow just splice a USB cable going from the battery bank? 

 

I also can probably find some old USB hub and just use more cables, but that'll obviously be less compact.

 

Thanks in advance,

John

[.Apex.]

25 minutes ago, German_John said:

I'm pretty new to tinkering with electronics, so this is probably a really easy issue (but I didn't know how to google for it).

I salvaged some old laptop speakers and bought a little amp board for it. I also have an old bluetooth receiver. Both take 5V.

I ALSO have a few old battery banks that I can easily salvage to power it, but it'd be great if I could power everything off of a single cable. 

Basically, I want to be able to plug in the battery bank and then power two devices off of it (the thing only has ONE USB out, sadly. How would I go about that?

I can solder a little bit, so would it be possible to somehow just splice a USB cable going from the battery bank? 

 

I also can probably find some old USB hub and just use more cables, but that'll obviously be less compact.

Have one connection to the Battery Bank input for charging, and from the Battery Out connect the rest of the devices in parallel, and don't forget to implement a switch between the output and the devices so you can turn everything off without wasting any battery unnecessarily.

[German_John]

2 hours ago, _Syn_ said:

Have one connection to the Battery Bank input for charging, and from the Battery Out connect the rest of the devices in parallel, and don't forget to implement a switch between the output and the devices so you can turn everything off without wasting any battery unnecessarily.

Thanks! Was mainly wondering about parallel vs series for this. 

[mariushm]

You could just get a couple of usb extension cables and cut them in the middle and then solder together the 5v (red) and ground (black) wires. 

I guess you could leave the data wires connected and going to only one end, just in case they would be needed

 

example: https://www.newegg.com/black-rosewill-6-ft-usb-2-0/p/N82E16812119004