Rigging a Bretford Mobility Cart to act like a Bretford PowerSync Cart

To store and charge our Library’s set of 20 iPads, we have a Bretford Mobility Cart purchased in the fall of 2010. Had we but waited a few months, we would have bought the Bretford Powersync Cart which stores, charges, and syncs the iPads to a designated computer.

To rig our Mobility Cart for syncing as well as charging the iPads, David Waterbury (one of our extraordinary techies) followed steps listed in this site (thankfully shared to our NYCIST listserv by Tammi Williams, Technology Operations Manager at The Berkeley Carroll School of Brooklyn).

After three hours of tedium (a.k.a. David’s time), we now have two color-coordinated cables available for each iPad in the cart – red is for charging and white is for syncing.

Note: Instead of using multiple daisychained D-Link hubs, David purchased one 24-port hub. Also, David said that the Apple iPad cables run a bit short when stringing them from the 24-port hub on the top of the cart to the bottom shelf of the cart.

Now I’m just wondering when Parat will come out with something awesome for storing and syncing iPads too…