Charging Garmin rino off USB

[SICARIO]

I've been wanting to be able to charge all of my electronics off of my solar panel/portable battery. My iPhone and inReach were straight forward since they charge us USB.

The Garmin 600 series, however, uses a 12V cigarette lighter charger that utilizes 9-10V. USB output is only 5V.

Solution, a step-up converter from 5-9v and then spliced into the Garmin charger.

I did a ton of internet searches for a USB solution and could find none. This mod was surprisingly easy, can't imagine I'm the first to do it.

Hope this helps out the other backcountry hunters that don't want to carry AA batteries for their Garmin once the charge runs out on the lithium.

 

[ChrisS]

I just did this the other week. I don't use my rino in the backcountry away from a power source often, but when I do, it's usually for a solid 4-5 days.

tttoadman posted it back in March. It's a great fix, $20 in cables and a few minutes stripping wires and taping them back up.

The first night I tried, my Rino was ~66% and my power brick was low, but still had quite a bit of juice I thought. I left it overnight and the Rino was 100%, but the brick was 0. Hopefully, that was just a result of their respective charge levels and not that the Rino just kept drawing juice after it was 100% for some reason.

 

[Mruda1]

Glad someone posted about this because I'm going through this dilemma for my December hunt. I've never used my Rino on a backpack hunt but I planned on using a cigarette lighter charger to USB converter that'll charge from a dark energy charger. Thoughts??


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[Mruda1]

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[SICARIO]

The key is the 9V the Garmin needs to charge. The USB to cigarette lighter will only provide 5V. A step up converter is necessary.

I thought of using a cigarette lighter socket on the end of the step up converter, but I wanted light weight so I cut and soldered the wires instead.

 

[Mruda1]

Would this work with a 12v output?


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[SICARIO]

Looks like it should work. From one of the reviews on Amazon

You might lose a little bit of efficiently since the adapter is likely a 5V-12v step up converter, and then the rino charger is a 12v-9V reducer. I wanted to go straight from 5V-9V, which is why I went the splicing method.

This way seems to be an easy plug n play method though

 

[Mruda1]

Awesome thanks!