My wife bought me a $50 black Friday seven inch Android tablet

It charges via a barrel jack. It has USB OTG.

I must connect it to an arduino. I must connect it to my RepRap!

I must make a USB OTG cable. I grabbed an old USB charger and started to work with that. I broke one of the pins off. DOH!

So I attacked a new USB cable I'd gotten to charge my phones. It only has 4 pins! Careful examination shows that the 5th is short and is buried in the plastic. So I clipped some of the plastic off and solder bridged it to the ground pin.

It worked! I got it to talk to my arduino clone. Its a little bit flakey, not every upload is successful.

In album USB OTG

The tablet talks to the arduino! Success!

I thought I was clever by using wires to stub out the pins to verify my solder bridge worked. Took me a while to figure out I was grounded to the housing. I ended up measuring to the far end of the cable to check it before I plugged it into anything.

I was upset the cable didn’t work at first with the mouse. Can you tell I was tired?
It worked much better when I plugged it in instead of the cut off bit of USB cable.

4 spots when I need 5. Solder bridge to the rescue.

The bridge is buried in there on the left side.

I Strip the wires short…

As the heat from tinning them well expose more wire.

Tolerable job on the cable I think. The sheild ground isn’t actually connected to the jack on either side it appears even though there is a pin for that purpose on the micro usb side.

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