1 Topic by comapony (edited by comapony 2014-06-03 05:28:06)

  • From: Inglewood, CA
  • Registered: 2014-05-31
  • Posts: 7

Topic: MagSafe on a battery board?

I have a macbook at the moment, and it'd be nice to not have two different chargers. But at the same time, I wanna keep true to the open source nature of novena. I know that it transmits information through the middle pin of the five for recognition of the adapter. If I were to get a magsafe board on ebay, could I add the connector to a battery board, and is it open source?

PS: this is my first post here, I'm kinda a newb when it comes to this low level hardware stuff, so, please be gentle.

  • xobs
  • Administrator
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  • Registered: 2014-05-25
  • Posts: 442

Re: MagSafe on a battery board?

You could connect a magsafe socket to the battery board, and it would work no problem.  If you wanted to be fancy, you could add a 1-wire protocol handler to the battery board to talk to the magsafe power supply to figure out wattage, and to control the LED.  I'll try and architect the code so that it wouldn't be too difficult to drop in that code.

  • From: Inglewood, CA
  • Registered: 2014-05-31
  • Posts: 7

Re: MagSafe on a battery board?

Oh, I always like to be fancy, but that's prolly over my head at the moment. I think I could figure this out though.

  • Registered: 2014-05-26
  • Posts: 91

Re: MagSafe on a battery board?

This could be of help, specially the "charger startup process":

http://www.righto.com/2013/06/teardown- … gsafe.html

  • From: Inglewood, CA
  • Registered: 2014-05-31
  • Posts: 7

Re: MagSafe on a battery board?

ballanux wrote:

This could be of help, specially the "charger startup process":

http://www.righto.com/2013/06/teardown- … gsafe.html

I saw this on google, it's really good. The only thing I'm curious about: don't magnets mess with electronics? I've heard about them degrading hard disks, and flash devices, et cetera. Does this only happen to storage devices? if so, does the chip that control the led states not contain any flash memory? (I think this is prolly the case.) How does the little controller in the end of the adapter survive if it's so close to a magnet?

  • From: New Zealand
  • Registered: 2014-06-09
  • Posts: 16

Re: MagSafe on a battery board?

comapony wrote:

The only thing I'm curious about: don't magnets mess with electronics? I've heard about them degrading hard disks, and flash devices, et cetera. Does this only happen to storage devices? if so, does the chip that control the led states not contain any flash memory? (I think this is prolly the case.) How does the little controller in the end of the adapter survive if it's so close to a magnet?

A static magnetic field is really no problem for flash memory or most other electronics smile

Daniel Rutter has a good explanation from a few years ago on his website - http://www.dansdata.com/gz009.htm