Reverse Engineering Apple’s Recharging Scheme

August 3, 2010 by Mike Szczys 52 Comments

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/13835359]

[Ladyada] has been hard at work reverse engineering the charging method used by Apple products. This saga takes us through the years as new devices were released and subsequently broke Minty Boost’s charging capabilities. It seems the data lines were gradually adopted as a means for iPhones and iPods to identify the charger that had been connected. By adding voltage dividers to the D+ and D- lines you can instruct the handheld to pull 1 Amp (with data voltages of 2.8v and 2.0v) for wall chargers or 0.5 Amps (2.0v on both data lines) for portable chargers. In the video above [Ladyada] removes the surface mount resistors from a commercial charger in order to measure the voltage divider and discover the secret.

Super Simple Gaming Controller For Android Or IPhone

July 29, 2010 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

If you’ve got an iPhone or Android device that you use with a Wii remote when gaming, this quick hack will give you the third hand you need to manage all of that hardware. [Syanni85] mounted his Android phone to a Wii wheel for just a few dollars in parts. He ran across the wheel itself at the dollar store, and the phone is held in place using a universal mounting bracket. A small square pad sticks onto the back of any device and mates with a base. He cut off the unnecessary parts of the base and glued it to the back of the wheel.

If you haven’t tried using a Wii remote with your phone yet, find out how to do it with iPhone or with Android.

Solar MintyBoost

July 10, 2010 by Devlin Thyne 9 Comments

We first wrote about the MintyBoost back in 2006. Today, Adafruit has created a tutorial for making a solar powered MintyBoost. Using a MintyBoost, a solar panel, LiPo battery and a charger, they built on their Solar LiPoly tutorial. They fed the power tap output of the LiPoly charger into the battery input of the MintyBoost to perform the voltage step-up for USB devices. Based on an instructable that used SparkFun parts, this tutorial shows how to use parts that are available from one source. We hear that there will be some evolution of the MintyBoost coming down the line that will including charging capabilities.

IPhone 4 Teardown

June 23, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 36 Comments

iFixit traveled all the way to Japan to bring you this iPhone 4 teardown, only to be shipped the device unexpectedly two days early!

We were surprised that the A4 processor (its naked body displayed for the world this past April) contained within the iPhone 4 had 512MB of ram, compared to the 256MB of the iPad. Other features include the 1420mAh battery (201mAh more than the 3Gs), 5MP rear camera and front VGA camera, and the use of micro-sim.

Frankly, we don’t see ourselves getting the device immediately, but how excited are you for the iPhone 4?

IPad Hacked To Include A Verizon MiFi

June 15, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 25 Comments

Finally, some hardware hacking on an iPad. Finding the 3G connection that came with the iPad lacking, this industrious hacker yanked it out and replaced it with the guts from a MiFi. At the cost of his GPS, he’s gained a better connection and is now a wifi hotspot. It wasn’t horribly complex, but he did have to do a tiny bit more than just plug and play.

[thanks Smilr]

Using IPad SIM With An IPhone

May 14, 2010 by Mike Szczys 27 Comments

[Aaron Nelson] tipped us off about a simple hack to use an iPad SIM with an iPhone. You won’t be able to use the iPhone as a phone, but the relatively cheap $29.99 for unlimited Internet was his goal. He used an old plastic gift card to cut out an adapter for the iPad’s micro SIM so that it will fit into the iPhone’s SIM cradle as seen above. From there he used a web service via the WiFi connection to enter “Broadband” as a custom APN.

IPhone 3.1.3 Unteathered Jailbreak

May 3, 2010 by Mike Szczys 39 Comments

A method to Jailbreak the new 3.1.3 iPhone rom is here and it does away with tethering. Tethering is the problem that arose from the blackra1n exploit requiring a computer to reboot the iPhone. Although we saw a hardware workaround for that, it’s much nicer to do away with the issue completely. The new exploit is called Spirit and we found the site was getting hammered earlier so you should check out the writeup over at Redmond Pie if you can’t get through with the link at the top.

[Thanks Xb0xGuru via iPhone Hacks]