Galaxy S4 Inductive Charging Hack Keeps Everything Inside The Case

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We’ve seen this hack a bunch of times, but this does a great job of internalizing all of the phone-side inductive charging components.

It uses the Palm Pixi wireless charging hardware which seems to be the most popular system out there. We’ve already seen that you can add this to any phone that uses USB for charging. But we don’t like the idea of opening the phone to solder connections to the USB header. We also don’t want a USB plug sticking out the bottom of the phone all the time.

This hack satisfies both issues, and it’s actually thanks to the manufacturer. The Samsung Galaxy S4 just happens to have two contacts available inside the removable back plate which are designed for Samsung’s own inductive charging hardware. Contact with the Palm charging hardware is made by pressing copper foil into place. Mating foil traces on the inside of the back cover patch this into the Touchstone receiver hardware which is a direct transplant from a Palm case.

This is touted as a solution that costs under $30. That beats the current price of a genuine Samsung inductive charging kit by a wide margin.

17 thoughts on “Galaxy S4 Inductive Charging Hack Keeps Everything Inside The Case”

  3. Quick question, can harddrives be affected by induction chargers?

    I ask because I still use my ageing iRiver H140 mp3 player after many many years because it produces such a nice sound and has a full-function LCD wired remote, but it uses a 1.8″ 40gb harddrive. It would be nice to install an induction charging pad inside.

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    1. Dunno. I know, though, that Compact Flash cards use something like the IDE protocol, and adapters are available to use the cards as hard drives. So if they still actually make Compact Flash (just looked, they do!), it should be easy to rig up something. The adapters are just a few dollars. a 32 or 64GB card might be a good replacement.

      Perhaps try it with a smaller, cheaper card first, if you don’t have one lying around, CF aren’t as cheap as SD cards, and I think obsolete in new devices, be a shame to waste real money if it doesn’t work on your MP3 player. That said I suppose you could always use it as a solid-state HDD for your computer, A CF card through IDE should be pretty fast.

      This would avoid any magnetism-based problems, and will come in handy when the internal HDD eventually wears out.

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    2. Dumb & dangerous?

      Ah yes, that’d be why inductive charging toothbrushes weren’t introduced 2 decades ago and why there isn’t a whole industry around wireless power technology such as that used in RFID…dumbass.

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    1. all these “wireless charging receivers” are same. It just has different output contacts and shape. For example that charging receiver for galaxy S4 has contact and shape adapted for galaxy S4, but it can by also used in different phone with little bit of creativity. You have to connect output pads to Vcc and Gnd of usb connector, like is indicated on that ebay picture.

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  7. I applied the same hack on a Samsung S3MINI with success. However, the S3MINI has no special input for wireless charging. So I have connected the receiver to a capacitor on the main board where the power from the USB port enters. To prevent the electronics from the receiver to become fried when connecting an USB cable, I added a diode in series with the + of the receiver. Be aware to use a diode which has a drop of no more than 0.1 Volt, as a regular 0.6V diode will prevent wireless charging

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