silivrenion

I've resolved I'm going to check the potential voltages on all lines between an ipod and a wall charger and see what's going on... I've spliced a crap USB cable onto my breadboard, with a female USB plug on the other side of it, and exposed jumpers with which to put the probes on. I'll test it today and see what I can find.

Again, read the comments on the hack a day post and you'll see the problem. The HackADay Instructions are invalid for the regular iPod I've tried it, it wont charge the iPod, it just wakes it up. The iPod needs to detect voltage on the data lines in order to get power, except for the iPod shuffle, which is the only one that will work on this charger. Also, theres plenty of other battery packs out there that are Firewire. This needs to be a USB solution. That said, other than people stating the presence of articles on this stuff, which I've already researched, what voltages need to be on the USB data lines in order to tell the iPod "I have x watts available, and I'm a battery pack."

Taking a multimeter to the output of the dataports on a wallwart or something is a shoddy way to do it. As you know, a positive difference means its a wall wart, and a negative means its a battery pack. The magnitude means how many power levels are available. I suppose this could be done, though. Hey look, I don't mean to induce swearing and everything, and this certainly isn't a simple circuit if no one so far has been able to get the higher generation iPods to charge correctly on a USB architecture. Any constructive criticism or ideas for this hack are more than welcome! :D

Yet again, we need USB throughput, NOT firewire.

Sorry if I misunderstand, your typing uses next to no punctuation. Currently I have Pin 1 connected to the 5v+ on the output connector, and the pin4 negative to the negative rail. As far as I know, USB spec calls for the outside case of a USB connector to be a positive ground; are you telling me to connect this to 5v? I know the other articles are out there, and sure they may work for the iPod mini, but this is the full iPod, and if you carefully read the progression of comments, you'll see that no one has been able to successfully do this in a way compatible with the larger iPods; in fact, most people think its impossible to do (even though the iPod documents specify USB as a charging source). It is also worthwhile to note that many people have tried charging directly through the USB connector with no power regulation. This will burn out any iPod. The iPod expects 5v potential, and will NOT regulate USB in. They figure the designer is smart enough to know the internal power potential in the device is 5v, and USB is a direct input to the power rails of the device. I currently have the power regulator outputting 5v and everything should be dandy, heck, even some different devices will charge from it, but because of the unit identification part of the power detection spec, the data ports need to have some kind of potential on them. I don't know what it is, however, because the iPod patent doesn't go into that kind of specific detail. --------------------------------------- Edit :: After a little more research, it turns out voltages for the DP and DM lines are identified by "an available power indicator 204" (204 is an identification number). Further schematics show it is detected with a resistor arrangement biasing each pin to the next. This is only in the iPod power input however.. this doesn't answer the question of how much voltage is required on DP and DM. In english, this means that the voltage on DP and DM somehow controls the amount of watts available on my USB battery pack, depending exclusively on how much power is available on the pack, and how much voltage is present on DP and DM. This at least answers a little of a question. The voltage difference between DP and DM must be negative to be identified as a battery pack, however the magnitude of the power detected is reliant on the voltage levels of the two data lines. ----------------------------------------- Links of interest :: Section [0067] :: Detection of a USB power source on iPod - United States Patent

Since the valentines day message, the iPod releases aren't working, or aren't recognized by iTunes as valid podcasts. Is anyone else having this problem, or is something funny only happening to me?

News! I was able to make a prototype design that will charge the iPod by copying the pinouts of the wall wart adapter. I need to do more testing, and I'll release the schematic and information soon. UPDATE!!!! I have released the information about the iPod charging design to the Hak5 Dev forums. If you are interested, check it out here, but if you aren't a dev, you can't see it.. :( :: http://hak5.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2380 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm working on a little hack of my own regarding making an iPod-Compatible USB Battery. The purpose of the hack is to have a power source for the iPod through a USB port in a battery pack, and to be able to add some more hours onto the iPod's battery life. This is also a good idea if all you have available are disposable batteries, and a dead iPod. So I found an adjustable power regulator, a power source, and some resistors to create a 5v out potential. I salvaged a USB port from a PS/2 to USB adapter lying around. I connected everything and made it all good, but when I connect the iPod, it doesn't work! I have everything together so far, except I found that the USB port only 'wakes up' the iPod. I checked the iPod's detection of power sources patent information, and it turns out the iPod detects voltage potentials on the data lines to determine what kind of device it is connecting into, of which USB Battery is a choice. I need to know what the voltages are to apply to the USB data lines so that my iPod will detect the power and try to use it. Can anyone help with this hack? NOTE :: The idea from this hack came from hack-a-day's ipod altoids battery pack v2, except this battery pack hasn't been made to work via USB for the iPod. Everyone wants to give up on it, but I know there's a way to do this. Any help would be appreciated!!