Hardware Is it safe to use cheap chargers to charge the GBA?

[blueagent004]

In 2007, seven-year-old Connor O’Keefe, from South-East London, died playing with his Game Boy — he had been using a cheap, unbranded charger his family had bought on holiday in Thailand. He was electrocuted and found dead in his hotel room. Tests revealed the charger had ‘serious defects’. His mother, Patsy, said: ‘Until this happened to me, I would never have thought twice about buying a charger online. But you don’t have to go to a foreign country to get a dodgy plug, you can get them here, or get them sent here.’ {SOURCE}

Using non-compliant USB cables will degrade the components and battery of your devices, causing a potential scenario where the circuitry will one day just heat up and combust.
The controllers and chips inside the devices that manage the power draw can be damaged with repeated use of those cables.

on ebay there's alot of third party gba chargers and cheap $1 usb charging cable for the gba, and i was wondering if those are actually safe to use?


thanks for the help!

 

[MrCatFace]

100% OK

 

[ThoD]

As long as the values are right (Amperage/Voltage in/out) and it's not so low quality it blows up, then it's fine to use whatever charger you can find! I use an old Motorola charger for example (changed the plug though with that of my broken GBA charger) and haven't had any issues in almost 10 years now.

 

[FAST6191]

If it is USB it is straight through and just fine, or at least as fine as whatever USB source you are using (plug one of those into a bad supply and yeah)..

If it takes your mains and then converts it to GBA plug then that might be a different matter -- there are some awful power supplies out there these days. I can't rule out one being bad (could be someone found a box of them in a warehouse and figured they would flog them but as GBAs are old then nobody would want one...) but there is a strong correlation between cheap and bad.

 

[blueagent004]

If it is USB it is straight through and just fine, or at least as fine as whatever USB source you are using (plug one of those into a bad supply and yeah)..

If it takes your mains and then converts it to GBA plug then that might be a different matter -- there are some awful power supplies out there these days. I can't rule out one being bad (could be someone found a box of them in a warehouse and figured they would flog them but as GBAs are old then nobody would want one...) but there is a strong correlation between cheap and bad.

thank you so much for the informative reply! i think i'll just buy a gba usb cable and charge via my pc's usb port.

thanks again for your help!