Battery Eliminator for Fisher Price Baby Swing

From the Robinson House mailbag:

James,

I was interested in the info you posted about the battery eliminator for the baby swing. I don’t know anything at all about wiring, but have been wanting to do soemthing with our baby swing so we don’t have to spend our life’s savings on D battaries. We don’t have the same kind of baby swing as you (ours is a Fisher Price Aquarium swing). Do you have any idea if most baby swings will have about the same wiring, and if I could probably use your same instructions for our swing?

Thanks,

Stephanie

My Response:

Hi Stephanie,

Looking at the swing on the internet, my hunch is that you don’t need a setup quite that complicated.

I’d bet that if you got the following pieces:

• 6V adapter


• extension cable - may not need, depends on where you swing is located with respect to a power outlet


• hobby leads


• alligator clip jumper set

…and hook them up like this:

Use two of the alligator clip jumper cables to connect to the ends of the hobby leads. Then plug in the 6V adapter + optional extension cable + hobby leads and use the other end of the alligator clip jumpers to hook to the battery terminals.

It should work. Here are a few more details:

If you’ll look at this picture: there are battery terminals on both sides where the D batteries touch; on one side the two terminals (the spring and the flat part) are actually hooked together - sometimes you can actually see that they are made from the same piece of metal. On the other side the spring and flat part are separate - unconnected. You want to connect the alligator clips to the side that is not connected. Additionally, it will matter which alligator clip goes to which side. Flip the swing to the on position and touch the clips (one to the spring terminal, one to the flat terminal - like the right hand side of my picture above) and see if you have power! If not, switch the two clips on the SAME side. If still nothing, try the other pair of terminals on the OTHER side of the battery compartment and repeat. If you see a little spark when you touch the clips, odds are you’re on the wrong side (but not always); but don’t worry, you haven’t damaged anything.

A few quick notes: the voltage/current at the clips is safe. It would be best to put some electrical tape around the hobby lead/alligator clip connection so that the two ends do not touch each other.

Worst case, you’ve wasted some time. You can return all the parts, just don’t completely destroy the packaging when you open the items.

Hope that helps!

James

And Stephanie’s Response:

James,

Thank you so much for your help with our baby swing. We got the parts you suggested and it worked just fine. (We ended up hooking the red aligator clip to the top right battery terminal and the black clip to the bottom right terminal, just so you know). Really appreciate it! That will save us a lot of money on batteries in the end. Plus now we can use the “extra” features on the swing, like the mobile and music, which we weren’t using before because they ran the batteries down more quickly.

Thanks,

Stephanie