Fast USB Charge of iDevices

[Melsion]

Hi,

thought I might share something I recently found out and is quite useful (at least for me!).

Some motherboard makers (Asus & MSI, as far as I know) are building their USB devices with the ability to deliver more than the standard 500mA so you can charge your iPad, iPhone, etc.

Then I run into this page:
http://korenkov.info/ipadcharge-util-updated

Just compiled and run the program as user, and the iPad started charging like it was connected to the wall charger.

But I was wondering, could this same code be used to charge an HTC phone, usb hard drive or any other device that can manage (or needs) the extra amount of power? Any ideas?

[Ant P.]

Other devices don't use the proprietary iDevice protocol, so chances are they don't need extra programs at all.

[Melsion]

I don't think there's anything propietary in charging USB devices, if you read the code, it's all done through the libusb library, it's all opensource. USB allways delivers some power (up to 500mA) so most devices charge, but much slower than the wall charger would (even the iPad charges slowly when displaying "Not charging" in the status bar, wtf apple?). My android phone charges from 5% to 100% in over 4 hours through usb, and it takes less than 90 minutes with it's charger.... both using the same port, just like Apple devices.

I may be wrong, but I remember reading some time ago part of the USB specification, and all these devices do to detect the charging mode (low usb power vs high usb power) was to detect the impedance of one of the data pins in the usb conector. So my guess is that libusb configures the usb controller to change the impedance of a pin, I'm just not sure the same would work for any other device.... would it be the same pin and the same impedance?