My co-worker asked me to do some soldering for him. He had a micro USB cable that he wanted to convert to an OTG cable. I didn’t know what an OTG cable was, but he told me that all I had to do was connect the pin five to ground on the micro USB connector.
i decided that I had to do some research on this, so I googled OTG cable and came up with a Wikipedia article. It said that normally the micro USB device is a slave; it acts like a storage device, not a computer. So grounding the pin 5 tells it to act as the host or computer, so you can plug other storage devices or a keyboard or a mouse into it. That’s pretty cool, you can add a second flash drive, for instance. Or connect it to a USB hub, and do multiple devices. BTW, OTG means On The Go.
I started working on the cable about quitting time, and managed to get the jacket removed and see some of the wires. But there were only four wires in the cable, there was no fifth wire. So I cut away part of the connector itself, until I got to the bare copper shield that covered the whole connector. I told him that I would try again tomorrow, but he said that he would try to find it.
I came back the next day and he had cut away all of the plastic around the connector and the wires were bare. So I soldered the pin 5 to ground and did some repairs to the cable to make it serviceable. He plugged a mouse into the cable and the cable into his tablet, and it worked. Cool! So I said I gotta get me one of those.
I looked on Amazon and eBay, and they wanted anywhere from 7 dollars to more than ten dollars for a single OTG cable. I figured I could find it cheaper. I found that Dealextreme.com was selling them for a dollar sixty apiece so I ordered several and the shipping was free. In a few weeks I’ll have them arrive in the mail. Maybe I’ll be able to get my cell phone to allow a flash drive to be plugged in. Then I can download those pictures into the flash drive. Cool!
Back to experimenting…