[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] EnricoTFYKD:
Hello Guys!

First of all, sorry for my English, it is not my native language. :rolleyes:

After a lot of reading about modding the Galaxy Nexus in order to add inductive (i.e. wireless) charging capability, and seeing that most of the mods around required opening the device, I decided to make my own flavour of this mod. :cool: So here it is, with some photos and a small tutorial.

I have used the usual Palm Pre Touchstone combo, so there is nothing new here.

However, I decided to use the pogo pins for the dock station to connect the charging coil to the device, and have added the coil on a hard cover. Lastly, instead of copper wire, I used a thin self-adhesive copper tape.

Here is the cover:

I got it from eBay for a few dollars.

First,from the Palm Pre cover I took out the coil with the charging circuit and the magnets, they are just glued below an adhesive. Use a heat gun or a hair dryer to soften the glue and a knife or something to pry it off. Then I have aligned the magnets on the cover with the help of the Touchstone dock, and superglued them.

Next step: I aligned the coil with the magnets the same way it was on the original Palm cover, glued it with double sided adhesive tape and added a few straps of of insulating tape (it's a high temperature insulating tape, which is perfect IMO because it's very thin and it can handle temperaturse up to 280C - so I could solder very close to it without melting it). :good:

To close the hole on the cover that let the pogo pins accessible I have put a piece of tape on the inside, then inserted the phone in the cover, and lastly added a good amount of epoxy. Sorry, I don't have a photo of this step. :(

Then, when the epoxy had settled, I took out the soldering iron.

I put two pieces of copper tape, as in the photo below, then I tinned the contacts on the coil and the copper tape, and lastly used two other small pieces of copper tape to bridge the contact and the copper. [See below] You could probably bend the tape at 90° flipping the adhesive side up, that's up to your taste. This way it's possible keep the solder joint very thin and neat.

Please notice, this image represent the first alpha version of the mod, I had to change a few details on the go and after some trial and error.

At first my plan was not to do any mod on the phone at all, but after one hour of failures, I decided that the only feasible way to make a good contact was to rise the pogo pins with some small solder blobs, such as here:

You have to take your time, don't hurry. I put the phone on a side to expose the pins, then heated the iron to the max temp and let a small solder blob fall from the point of the tip to the pin.

This is how the cover looked like at the end of the process.

Some black spray paint to make it look more professional:

And now, how it looks:

The cover still fits well, because the thickness of the circuit is a couple of millimeters at most.

Thanks to my sister for helping me with the photos.

Yep! It's charging!

Please notice: the charging rate is NOT AC, but USB (thus, a lot slower). This only happens because the circuit does not communicate with the phone through the central pin (it would require a PIC or something else to transmit two timed pulses, which is in short not doable). You can override this with a kernel capable of fast USB charging (such as franco.kernel).

To the mods: if I have done something wrong, please tell me and I'll try to fix it.

I have not posted any link to the products I have used, because I'm not sure if I'm allowed to, however you can get most of that stuff from eBay (not sure about the high temperature adhesive tape).

What do you think about this mod?