Apple sure loves taking features away from its phones – first it was the 3.5mm headphone jack, then it was the Lightning port. Don’t you just wish you could have it back? You do? Great, here you go! Wait, you actually meant that you wanted the 3.5mm jack back, not the Lightning port? Well, you should have said so earlier – here’s a case that lets you charge a brand new iPhone 17 Pro with all those Lightning cables that you still have.
It was created by Ken Pillonel, a freelance hardware prototyping consultant, with an enduring love for the Lightning port – he even added Lightning to an Android phone a few years back. Here is how the case was designed and built:
And here are some close-ups of the finished product:
This case adds a Lightning port to the iPhone 17 Pro
Pillonel did a great job of packing down a Lightning to USB-C adapter using custom PCBs to make the case as compact as possible. The case itself was 3D printed in TPU – let’s take a moment to appreciate the CAD model:
A CAD model for the Lightning case
Ken Pillonel is a genius – a mad genius, but still. He did the opposite five years ago, adding a USB-C port to an iPhone X (it was a hardware mod of the phone itself, not a case). His previous projects also include adding USB-C to the AirPods (before Apple did) and even adding wires to AirPods.
Jokes aside, Ken Pillonel has done some impressive work to make AirPods Pro cases more repairable and also sells much more practical cases that add a USB-C port to older iPhones from the 13 and 14 series, which were the last before the official switch to USB-C. You can check out his projects here and his cases and mods here.