I cant be the first to ponder this. I am looking to see if anyone else out there may have tried hooking up a Powermat or something similar to wirelessly charge your phone while in your car. I think it would be a great convenience to just toss your phone down there and have it charge while you stream through the bluetooth. I bring this up because I just purchased a Galaxy S3 and trying to figure out the best way to take advantage of the inductive charging system hookups. Anyone else have any thoughts?
That is a great idea! In fact, Powermat themselves suggest it for auto OEMs here: Solutions | Powermat - Be Powerful Here is someone that did it: Powermat your car He and others note that the Powermat requires an 18v DC source, so you would need to use an inverter (ugly) or find a 12v-18v converter. Here is an 18v, 80W laptop car charger for under $10: 80W Universal Laptop Notebook Car Charger 15V 16V 18V 19V 20V 22V 24V Compaq IBM | eBay. All it might need is some wiring and a check that 80W is enough (it should be plenty but check the Powermat wall cube). Pictures seem to indicate that the charger base is hard-wired to the power cube. I am going to Best Buy tomorrow to have a look!
Well, I went and did it. Since I use a BlackBerry Torch, my install will differ but it might give you some ideas. There are 2 problems with Powermat in a car: 1) Powermat requires 18v DC. You can solve this if you can find a cheap laptop car charger that will convert 12v to 18v. 2) You have to find a way to prevent your phone from sliding off the charger. A horizontal placement is not so good in the car anyway - at least for me - I want to use the phone display to see the Caller ID since my head unit does not display it (that might be a BlackBerry) issue. Anyway, I solved those problem to my short-term satisfaction (the holder is pretty ugly) and will work more on it in the spring when it warms up again. For the curious, I've attached a couple of pictures. The Caller ID display is much easier to see at a glance than the picture suggests. For the very curious I've attached a write-up of the modifications and install.
