Easy Night Lamp with Mobile Phone Charger
You can easily make a night lamp or night light using a mobile phone charger. Most of us put our phone to charging at night and those who wants a little light in the room while snoozing uses a seperate lamp, so by creating this, we are doing 2 things – phone can be charged and turn on a night lamp.
For the lamp, we need to use a white LED light that you can get from any electronics shop for cheap prices. We don’t need bright light at night so this lamp will output light that is just enough to barely see the room. If you want, you can try other color LEDs, blue,red or green, it’s your choice.
If you need more brightness, you can reduce the value of resistor and use a bright LED, a 1 watt LED should be sufficient
Components you need
- 1K – 10K resistor
- LED (Use a 1.5V or 3V LED)
Choose resistor depending on the brightness you want, more resistance – less brightness. eg: 1K resistor = more brightness. 10K resistor = low brightness
Assembling the circuit
You will need open the charger and make a hole in the charger cover, the hole should be the size of LED. Use soldering iron hot tip or Driller to make hole
The LED terminals must be connected to the output of the charger. Most chargers output +5V, our LED for night lamp doesn’t need 5V. Most LEDs work from 1.5 to 3+ Volts, so we are using a resistor to limit the current, the resistor must be soldered to one of the legs of LED.
Use a Multimeter to find out the + (positive) and – (Negative) of a charger output, usually it is easy even without a multimeter, just by looking to the position of capacitor. If your charger has a USB port, then the body of USB port is usually connected to ground or negative, you should connect the LEDs negative to this body connection and the plus to +5V Out.
Here is a photo of charger with LED soldered to output
End Result
