Friday, November 11, 2022

First Folding iPhone Doesn’t Come from Apple

An iPhone sits in a users hand open to the YouTube app. What is unusual is that the iPhone is bent in an L shape and is still functioning properly.

Folding phones are all the rage these days, with many of the major smartphone manufacturer’s having something in this form factor. Apple has been conspicuously absent in this market segment, so [KJMX] decided to take matters into their own hands with the “iPhone V.” (YouTube – Chinese w/subtitles via MacRumors).

Instead of trying to interface an existing folding phone’s screen with the iPhone, these makers delaminated an actual iPhone X screen to use in the mod. It took 37 attempts before they had a screen with layers that properly separated to be both flexible and functional. Several different folding phones were disassembled, and [KJMX] found a Motorola Razr folding mechanism would work best with the iPhone X screen. Unfortunately, since the iPhone screen isn’t designed to fold, it still will fail after a relatively small number of folds.

Other sacrifices were made, like the removal of the Taptic Engine and a smaller battery to fit everything into the desired form factor. The “iPhone V” boasts the worst battery life of any iPhone to date. After nearly a year of work though, [KJMX] can truly claim to have made what Apple hasn’t.

Curious about other hacks to let an iPhone do more than Apple intended? Check out how to add USB-C to an iPhone, try to charge it faster, or give one a big memory upgrade.



from iphone hacks – Hackaday

Thursday, November 3, 2022

Just How Fast Could You Charge An iPhone?

PSU charging an externally connected supercapacitor bank that's powering the phone. There's a current clamp on one of the wires to measure charging current, and a multimeter measuring the charging voltage.

An iPhone 8, now a relatively cheap model, can charge its battery fully in two hours’ time. There’s hardly ever a need for faster charging, but it’s fair to ask – how much faster could it really go? [Scotty Allen] from [Strange Parts], back after a hiatus, is back to stretching the limits of what a regular iPhone can do, and decides to start off with an exploration of battery technologies.

What people commonly encounter is that charging speed depends on the charger involved, but even one hundred chargers in parallel won’t speed up this iPhone’s charging rate, so what’s up? First off, the phone’s charger chip and the battery’s BMS will both limit charging current, so for experiment purposes, those had to be bypassed. First attempt was using a hefty DC power supply with the original cell, and, unsatisfied with the lack of fire and still relatively slow charging, [Scotty] decides to up the ante.

There’s a few battery technologies you could pair with a phone if your aim is to speed up charging dramatically, and [Scotty] demonstrates one of them in action – for instance, Lithium-titanate batteries can take quite a pounding when it comes to charging current, and they’ve helped get the charging time down to 22 minutes. However, that’s no match for a supercapacitor pack, which the charging time down to nine minutes – a thirteenfold increase from the 90 minutes we expect. We might not hold a supercap-based iPhone anytime soon, but now, we sure have seen one.

Facing this demo, Apple ought to be ashamed of their Lightning charging ports. Perhaps, with a few hobbyist-friendly supercapacitor tricks in hand, supercapacitors will be handy for someone’s statistically inevitable project where charging time will be of major importance. Until then, we’ll probably keep focusing our efforts on building powerbanks.



from iphone hacks – Hackaday