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  • AXS Charger USB-C conversion
  • RAGGATIP
    Free Member

    I bought a Pinecil fairly recently and have been putting it to use converting some of my micro-usb devices to usb-c. One of those was my SRAM AXS battery charger. This is so I don’t have to carry so many cables on bikepacking rides or long audaxes. I bought a dual charger which already has usb-c but don’t find that charger quite as effective as the original.

    The job is not easy as none of the pins align. I needed a fine tip, steady hand aswell as some bridging wires.

    I used two 5k1 0805 1/8w resistors on the C1 and C2 pins to enable use with the more powerful chargers.

    Linked the two negative terminals and then the two positive terminals, scraped away some of the pcb resin to allow soldering to the positive and negative traces. It was too tight to solder to the existing positive and negative terminals. The usb-c connector is larger than micro-usb. I insulated those with expoxy resin.

    I soldered the connector to the board for grounding and strength since I’d cut the four little legs off as they didn’t align with the original holes on the pcb. Then I used epoxy resin to make things a little more water resistant aswell as provide additional strength for the bridging wires.

    Edit: Not sure why but pictures aren’t showing. Should I delete this post and use weightweenies forum instead?

    RAGGATIP
    Free Member

    You’re right it is, at least in the short term.

    The purpose behind this conversion was to reduce things to carry on a camping trip.

    With that adaptor you’d need to take it off if you were using the same cable to charge other devices that had usb-c, unless you carried an additional cable.

    Additionally micro-usb is more fiddly to use. Works one way only whereas usb-c works whichever way the cable is inserted. Micro-usb is also more fragile. This matters on camping trips when you’re likely to be tired at the end of a long bike ride.

    The effort here is in the conversion but the long term benefits in convenience are where the gains are to be made. Although it’s more effort trying to post up photos to help people on this forum than doing the conversion. Not sure why I bothered lol.

    bikerevivesheffield
    Full Member

    Could you not leave the adapter in the port on the Axs charger

    RAGGATIP
    Free Member

    You could do but you would have the adaptor sticking out a long way. You’d still be relying on the strength, or lack of, the micro-usb connector if any pressure is applied to the adaptor.

    Remember we’re talking about bikepacking here where weight, lack of faff, space and generally reducing the number of items you’d need to carry are factors that are important.

    At home it doesn’t matter so much. The AXS battery charger is great in that you can actually charge your AXS batteries from a bicycle dynamo if you wanted to as it’s 5 Volts. The same cannot be said for Shimano batteries as they charge off a different voltage, 7.2 Volts I believe, and there is not regulator converting the dynamo output to 7.2 Volts as far as I know whereas all regulators output to 5 Volts. So to take advantage of this benefit it helps when you can have a more robust connection whilst simultaneously reducing the items you have to carry.

    The photos are here as I cannot see them above…

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