Stacy Millions built his mintyboost to match up with a OpenMoko Neo phone. By default, the phone uses the ‘correct’ 100mA drain current to charge when there is no USB enumeration. However, it is possible to force the phone into using a 500mA charging current via software. So he wrote a little app that will hypercharge!
This is pretty cool: if you have a typical phone, there is no way to poke & hack the hardware at these levels.
More:
MintyBoost USB Charger Kit v1.2 – Build your own MintyBoost: a small & simple (but very powerful and very MAKE-like)USB charger for your iPod (or other mp3 player), camera, cell phone, and any other gadget you can plug into a USB port to charge.
4 thoughts on “Open source charger for an open source phone”
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http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Forcing_fast_charge_mode
But trying to get odd charger connectors these days is very difficult. For instance, I own a Palm E2, which uses a very odd, side-by-side connector at who knows what voltage?
I also just purchased a Woot sale item (a Soyo Group tiny stereo A2DP transmitter/receiver pair. It came with ONE USB charger plug for TWO units (one TX and one RX). Now, how in the world do you charge them both at the same time? No micro-USB Y-connectors in my junk box. This one is one of the REALLY tiny female micro-USB connectors to charge, so none of the ones I already had would fit this item.
Those are just examples of hard connectors to find.