Wed, 12 May 2010
Reverse the polarity!
It was a dark and stormy night. Well, not really. It was more of a sunny afternoon but I promised Wouter I would start my next blog post with the famous Bulwer-Lytton sentence.
So, anyway, it wasn't a dark and stormy night but a bright and sunny afternoon a few weeks ago when I ordered a USB charging cable for my cell phone. They're unreasonably expensive in Belgium but I found a great deal on DealExtreme. A Genuine© Immitation™ Nokia®-Like one even.
Today the cable arrived but when I plugged in my phone it refused to charge.
Linux complained too:
[959307.552135] hub 5-0:1.0: over-current change on port 2
Clearly something was wrong with the cable. Two minutes with a multimeter and a working cable for comparison
showed that somehow the ground and +5V connections were inverted.
15 minutes with a soldering iron fixed that. All in all I got a great deal: a charging cable, half an hour of
entertainment and that lovely feeling of having fixed something for less than a quarter of the price of
a genuine Nokia cable.
Beware of geeks with soldering irons.
posted at: 23:34 | path: / | [ 0 comments ]