How To Hack A USB Charge Cable
Date: Wednesday, April 20 @ 22:37:11 UTC
Topic:
This issue has been discussed in our forums a number of times and affects devices from quite a number of manufacturers. When connected to the PC they mount as a disk drive and when connected to the supplied USB car charger they will charge and function as normal.
But, when connected to a third party 12v USB charger they act as if connected to a PC and refuse to charge or to offer the normal GPS related display and functionality.
This occurs because the manufacturer has chosen, for reasons best known only to them as USB is supposed to be a standard, to short USB pins 4 and 5. The device looks to see if pin 4 is grounded and if not, it switches to USB disk mode.
It's naughty because there is no good reason for doing this. A correctly wired device should be able to mount as a disk and charge when connected to a PC without this subterfuge and all it achieves is to prevent you from using third party chargers.
A Hackaday reader investigate as this problem affected his Magellan and, having found the cause, set out to hack a standard USB cable and ground the unused pin 4 to pin 5. Now he can use the cable with any USB charger.
He has posted the Hack with an explanation on Flickr and whilst it may not be for everybody, anyone who has a spare USB-MiniUSB cable, a steady hand and a soldering iron may want to give it a go.
This issue affects Magellan, Mio and Navman devices and I'm sure Garmin has this issue with some models.
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