Gadgetory

wireless charging is making its way into the market but it's still not on some of the most popular phones like the Samsung Galaxy s3 but with a little bit of hacking I was able to take the parts from the old retired palm pixi wireless charging kit and make it work with the Samsung Galaxy s3 what's great about the palm pixi case is that when attached to the phone all you have to do is place it on the touchstone and it'll start charging the phone so what we're going to do is take those wireless charging parts out of this case put them in the s3 so when we're done you'll be able to put this phone on the touchstone and the phone will charge here's what you'll need to get started you'll need the palm touchstone charger the palm pixi wireless charging case some copper tape scotch tape sticky notes and some sort of flat tool to pry off the parts from the case so the first thing we have to do is remove the parts from this pixi case and to do that we'll remove the black lining you should be able to do that with your finger all right set that aside you might want it later and as you can see all of those wireless charging components are exposed before you remove anything though grab a small piece of paper and plot where the components are to make a little template including the little metal disks you'll refer to it again in a bit grab a small knife and carefully remove the circuit board then the silver adhesive and finally the copper coil these are the parts that allow your phone's battery to receive a wireless charge finally remove the metal disks it might take a little extra muscle for this part at this point I've torn apart the palm pixi case which is now even more useless than it already was and now my task is to take these components and put them in the backplate of my samsung galaxy s3 so let's do it grab the coil and place it upside down onto the inside of the back plate so that the black part of the circuit board is facing down make sure the whole thing is positioned about 1/2 inch from the bottom edge of the cover now bend the l-shaped circuit board up this puts it in a position that allows it to make contact with your phone's battery replace the metallic adhesive over the coil using tape if it doesn't adhere anymore then using the template you made in the first step place the metal disk so that they're positioned around that coil these will keep your phone attached to the touchstone once everything is positioned tape it down with some scotch tape the final step is to bridge these parts in your back plate with your phone's battery that's where the copper tape comes in you'll need four strips for this last step on this circuit board you'll see two power terminals take one piece of tape and fold over one end then take that end and place it directly over one of the power terminals hold it in place and stick the tape down so that it reaches the end of the back plate go ahead and rip off any excess tape if you need to then repeat the same process for the second terminal now on your phone take another piece of tape fold over one end and place it over the battery terminal using a pen to shove it in to make sure there's good contact with the terminal then go ahead and stick it down onto the back of your phone go ahead and repeat the same process for the second terminal alright we've done all of the heavy lifting and now's the moment to see if this thing actually works so to do that I'm going to place the backplate on the touchstone and I'll grab this digital multimeter and place it on the power terminals here and what I should get is at least a 5.5 reading and we know it works because I'm getting 5.6 so now we verified that this setup is sound let's put this together and see that the whole contraption works if you want to at this point you can put this black lining back on your backplate or use some sort of other cover to clean this look up but I'm going to leave it the way it is so I'll assemble these two and actually the wireless charging parts are so thin that your backplate should be able to close as usual alright now is the moment of truth let's see if this works and it does because I'm getting an actual notification letting me know that wireless charging is enabled because that software is actually built into the phone even though Samsung never released a solution of its own but now your DIY wireless charging hack is working and even though it won't charge as fast as if you were plugged into the wall what you lose in speed you do gain in convenience and awesomeness if you have any questions along the way hit me up on Twitter and check out my blog with the step-by-step instructions and photos on how to complete this project and thank you to the XDA Developers forums for this hack for cnet.com I'm Sharon Vaknin