We teach the "iron horse" to share electricity

Greetings, Habr!

Summer is coming, which means that many of us roll out our motorcycles, mopeds and other two-wheeled friends from the garages and parking lots. And also, in the summer we love to travel, don't we? Well, some of us combine business with pleasure and travel just on their two-wheeled friends . And I wanted to tell about one way to facilitate such travel today.



Warning: under the cut a few photos of terrible quality, taken on the phone. People with limited traffic or weak psyche is better not to go there.





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It so happened that in our age of developed technologies, we can not do without some of the usual gadgets. When traveling, we always want to stay in touch, we need a phone (or better, a smartphone) at hand, and we don’t want to carry a map with us (and you don’t look at it on the go), so we need a navigator. Unfortunately, despite the abundance of topics about new types of batteries, gadgets still can not boast of sufficient battery life. And here we are overtaken by the problem: if we can recharge the device from the cigarette lighter in the car, then this option is not provided for in most motorcycles. It is this lack of two-wheeled transport that we are going to correct today. Below is a brief guide to weaning your "horse" from greed and teaching him to share "food." The test is Kawasaki ER-6n 2007.



To begin, we will need the cigarette lighter itself, and it is better that this nest is waterproof. I ordered myself this from Amazon:







It has a cover for protection against moisture, as well as a convenient platform for mounting on the steering wheel. If you do not want to mount on the steering wheel, on sale there are threaded sockets for installation in plastic of the motorcycle. But I did not want to drill anything. They cost an average of 13 Euros.







But putting only one cigarette lighter is somehow boring, so I decided to add a voltmeter to it, to monitor the state of the generator and the battery. The voltmeter took the simplest, it cost me 3.5 euros at the same Amazon.







At first there was a thought to connect it separately, but then decided not to pull a bunch of wires and just soldered to the cigarette lighter terminals.

(all small pictures are clickable)

With the laying of wires no problems arose - he stretched next to the standard wiring from the steering wheel. The wires descend from the steering wheel, go under the tank, and go out under the saddle in the battery compartment.



Battery compartment and wire outlet:







After we stretched the wires, we put a plastic cap in place and they will not go anywhere.







The wires already had ears for fastening to the battery terminals, so there are no problems here either. The main thing - do not forget to put the fuse. We do not want, in which case, burnt gadgets and molten wires? A standard 20 amp car fuse with a slot mounted in the wire cut will do. Finding such a nest in car shops should not be a big problem.







For mounting the voltmeter I used a metal clamp, for lack of a better one. Drilled a couple of holes in it for mounting and screwed to the front visor. It does not look very aesthetic, so now I am looking for a more suitable mount. At the same time I want to tighten the wires in heat shrinkable hose. I'll do it as soon as the rains stop.

With the fastening of the cigarette lighter itself, everything is simpler: there are holes in the landing, we pass nylon ties through them and tighten them on the steering wheel. Simple and effective!



This is how it looks after connecting:







And this is how it all looks in the dark:







Well, that's all, now our "horse" is always ready to share the much-needed electricity away from home.

On this, let me take my leave. Smooth roads to you, habravchane! And to new meetings.



PS Attentive readers, at least a little familiar with electrical engineering, probably noticed one significant drawback of my wiring diagram. I know about him and plan to fix it in the near future.