Powering Various things VIA USB

[Faustt]

I know this is FAR from the right board to ask this, but I was wondering if anyone knew of a board, or knows anything on the subject.

Basically, I got a new wireless mouse and it's great. the base station however needs to be plugged into the wall. being 90% laptop user this sucks.

on the power adapter it says 8 volts at 500 mAmps. USB is 5 volts at 500 mAmps... So just going from USB to the connector in the back isn't going to work. Not knowing exactly how volts work, would it be possible to use TWO ports to get 10 volts? or does it not add up like that? With 10 volts it would power it, but I'd have to add a resistor... or something so it wouldn't over heat or anything.

The thing supposedly gets 13 days off of a charge, so I probably won't have to worry about charging it if I take it with me somewhere without a wall outlet. I just wanna solder something though =)

[OverCoat]

the base station however needs to be plugged into the wall.

um...

...

ew?

[Drack]

How are you planning on connecting the non-USB end of the cable to the mouse/batteries?

[Faustt]

I'm okay with a soldering iron. I was planing on heading to radio shack with my base station and trying random universal adapters until one fit. Then just solder on a few wires and electrical tape it up.

[Smoke]

I would not recommend this at all, and I doubt you'd get what you want. In fact, you could risk damaging your laptop's USB ports, the wireless receiver, or worse if you're just gonna poke around without knowing what you're doing.

You'd be far better off just getting a different wireless mouse that runs on batteries and just has a receiver, along with rechargeable batteries and something like this: http://www.engadget.com/2005/08/08/the-usb-battery-charger/

Alternatively: Get a wired mouse. There's no need for wireless mice on a laptop unless you have gorilla arms.

Sidenote: This is coming from someone who's hooked up various self-built things to computers(Mainly serial/parallel) and programmed microcontrollers for self-designed circuitboards in college. If you don't have the knowledge for this, don't even consider attempting it.

[Faustt]

Thanks for the words of warning Smoke. I have rough idea what I'm doing. Plus I have a friend to fall back on whose an electrical engineer, though oddly, not a PC person. So I asked him a few questions and said it's probably doable. But to make sure I test everything with a multimeter.

So in theory, combining two USB ports should result in 10 Volts and 1K mAmps. I think need to use a resistor to bring the mAmps down, then a voltage regulator to get the voltage down to 8. Then a capacitor so if something does go wrong, that'll blow vs my laptop.

I'll give this a go weekend. I'll test it out on an old laptop. That 333Mhz PC will have a use again! :-D