Quick cyberdeck build: Part 7

I've been worrying about the charging of the battery for the Cyberdeck and my naïve idea was to simply stick a TP4056 charger inline with the battery. This sort of worked and when I fitted the new battery recently I checked it was OK, but the behaviour of the phone and the labelling on the pack gave me pause.

For a start the phone doesn't know the battery is charging. This sort of doesn't matter but you've also got the issue the charger doesn't know when to stop charging if the phone is switched on, due to the load from the device. This is exactly the sort of stuff I get fussy about in other projects and it's nagging at me that I was not practicing what I preach.

Also the TP4056 is set up for a slightly different chemistry cell with a 4.2v charge voltage. The battery I received has a 4.35v charge voltage and a peer at the images for these Motorola replacements shows they're all the same.

You can't change the charge voltage on the TP4056 it's preset.

This put the nail in the idea of just sticking that TP4056 charger inline and I'm back to charging it via the phone. Which is precluded by the OTG USB needed for the keyboard and trackball.

So I need to make it switchable.

For USB OTG to occur, the usually unused ID pin on the micro USB connector needs to be connected to ground. When this happens it turns the phone into a USB host and it starts supplying 5v on the VBUS pin normally used to charge the phone.

Once in USB OTG mode you can't charge the phone and supplying 5V on VBUS doesn't achieve anything. If you switch out of USB OTG mode while supplying 5V on VBUS with a device still attached this particular phone cycles from charging to not, which I'm not sure is expected behaviour or not but it's what I've got to deal with.

I've done a practical test to verify all this and using a couple of switches means you can swap from charging to USB OTG reliably. I'm sure something could be done with a few MOSFETs to effect the required swaps when you connect a charger but for this project I'm just going with a DPDT switch made out of two small SPDT switches mostly for time reasons. This has the added benefit of allowing me to completely disconnect the USB peripheral if I want.

So I've got to remake the little flat USB OTG cable I made and rework the whole thing, but I think it's worth doing slightly more properly than I'd planned.