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By pivotCE
Well, it’s 2024 and technology continues to advance. The TouchPad isn’t new by any means, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be slightly modernized to be more convenient today. Specifically, it is entirely possible to convert the TouchPad’s Micro USB port to USB C for charging and USB storage access. I’ll show you how.
This is a tough mod which requires micro-soldering and modifying a PCB which you will have a hard time sourcing a replacement for without buying another TouchPad. Proceed at your own peril.
Tools for the Job
To do this mod you’ll need a few things for tools and parts. Here’s a list of what I used:
– Needle nose pliers/tweezers
– USB C boards with 5.1k resistors
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– Soldering iron, solder, flux and a hot air station
– Flush cuts
– Dremel with cutting or sanding wheel
– 28 AWG wire or smaller. 30 AWG is pretty good but any wire around 0.25mm to 0.5mm should work.
– Small file and screwdriver set
– Painter’s and kapton tape
– Metal spudger Disassemble the TouchPad
This is where you’re going to want to get that metal spudger out and be very careful not to snap clips. I can’t explain it better than iFixit already did so go check out their and then come back here.
Modify the USB Connector Board by Removing the Micro Port
There are a few ways to remove the Micro USB port. I added a bunch of flux and coated all the connectors in fresh leaded solder and then used a hot air station set to 800 degrees while wiggling the port very slightly with needle nose pliers. You don’t have to be particularly careful here so if you want to cut the port off with the dremel or the flush cuts or just rip it off with the pliers, (I don’t recommend it but…) that’s fine. We’re not using the pads it’s soldered to anyway. You should STILL be careful not to crack the board. Go slow. Be patient.
Trim the USB C Board
We need to expose the USB C port a bit on this board so let’s cut it down. Grab the painter’s tape and flip the USB C board upside down. You’ll see a small trace between the front and rear anchor points on the right side, which we don’t want to cut. Mark the tape just on the other side of that trace like I did. Dremel along the tape line until you get to the port. You can then use needle nose pliers, a flat file, and/or flush cuts to remove the rest of the board from the bottom of the port.
Prepare the USB Connector Board for the USB C Port
We need to slide the port into the old space so grab the painter’s tape again and mark off the area I marked to make room for the USB C port. You can place the port up to it like I did and use that as a guide. Grab your dremel again or a similar tool and cut out what you marked off. When you’re done, the USB C port should slide easily into the groove. It will fit tighter when we add the kapton tape in a later step.
Make Room in the TouchPad for the Added Thickness of the USB C Board
The USB C board will sit underneath the USB connector board so we have to make room by trimming away the plastic underneath. For this you’ll need to use flush cuts or any other tool you have to chip away. You could use the dremel for this if you’d like. Be careful to not go beyond the first inner layer. Beyond that is the outer shell of the TouchPad. There’s no real method here, just cut out the screw posts and chip away. Use the pictures below as a guide.
Cut the USB C Hole from the Old Micro USB Hole
To open the micro USB hole enough to fit the USB C port, take a rounded file to the left and right of both sides and just file a little bit at at time. Use a small flat file to widen the top and bottom of the port. This process is just trial and error. File a little and then grab the USB C board to test. The port will need to fit inside the hole a bit so you can push it through from the outside to test the hole size if that’s easier. Note: the USB C board will likely not rest on the bottom of the TouchPad and will float a little. This is good because it makes room for your wires and a little kapton tape underneath.
Tape the USB C Board
Since we hacked away at the USB connector board it’s possible we’ve provided the perfect environment for creating shorts! Oh no! So get out the kapton tape because we’re going to add a layer on both sides. You’ll see how I did it on one side below. Do it on both sides. You’ll also notice how I did not cover those two small square contacts just at the bottom of the tape. That’s because we need them.
Where To Get Power and Data
You’ll see the diagrams below which I’ve marked with VBUS (power), data in, data out, and ground. Obviously the old port is gone and most if its pads, but I wanted to show that both sides of the board have the connections. You could possibly do this mod differently, and if you so choose, hopefully these help.
A quick note: this mod can be done with a 4-pin USB C port. That would give you power and data just like with the USB C board I’m using in this guide, however, a 4-pin USB C board will not charge with a USB C charger (ie USB 3.1). The board I’m using in this guide provides the ability to use any charger because it comes pre-built with 5.1k resistors wired to CC1 and CC2 to ground. This is the trick that tells the USB C chargers to send power to the device.
Solder the USB C Board into the USB Connector Board
This isn’t a “how to solder tutorial” so hit up youtube and find a good tutorial that works for you. In general though, use flux, pre-tin the VBUS, Ground, D-, and D+ pads on the USB C board as well as the points on the bottom of the USB connector board.
Now for the tricky part, I didn’t list it in the Tools section above, but it would really help to have magnification or a digital microscope for this. I have these things and I used both. You might have steadier hands and better eyes than me. The picture below was my first attempt of the three TouchPads I modded, and it’s not my best soldering work, but fundamentally, this is what yours should look like.
Put the Pieces Together
You can use a bit of kapton tape to secure the wires in place a bit more if you’d like but it’s not required. It won’t short since it’s only plastic underneath. This is all press fit into place, but if you’re uncomfortable with that, you can add a little hot glue under the board as you put it back into the TouchPad. You don’t have to put the metal shield back into place if you don’t want to. It’s all a pretty tightly fit and if you find the TouchPad screen isn’t as flush as you want, just leave the metal shield off. A little kapton tape right on top would be fine instead.
Congrats, You Now Have USB C
I did this mod on three TouchPads and each one works fine with any USB charger I could find, including USB C port having USB 3.1 chargers. I can also confirm the data connection works just like it should to connect via USB mode on PC. Sadly, this doesn’t do anything to stop webOS from telling you the charger you’re using isn’t the original TouchPad barrel charger, but you can make a custom cable to stop that which I’ll cover in a future article on pivotCE.
#webOS4ever
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By netsplit
Youtube only lets you type numbers, and not letters. Amazon doesn't let you type anything unless you use the really really really slow onscreen keyboard. It's ruining the tv experience. Can't search for topics or shows without the slow drugery of the slow remote and onscreen keyboard.
Is something ms configured or is WebOs really this awful?
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By Guy Mawson
I can’t use my remote with the new update. 17. Something I think?
OK my 55” is a few years old but it was working fine until an automatic update on an unsupported TV! I mean, why update unsupported tv’s with untested software?
Planned obsolescence - making us upgrade? Well, it’s the last LG telly I will buy for sure
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By pivotCE
link hidden, please login to view hold a number of events. This year’s will be of interest to fans of webOS phones, tablets and other computing devices of the past. The festival is held at the and runs over three days from the 12th to 14th of April. The festival includes three elements:
– some with modifications to function in the modern environment. and . . For readers of this blog, representation of webOS devices will be in two of those areas. Jon W of the is attending over the weekend and will give a 50 minute talk at 900am on Saturday the 13th. The consignment shop will have a small selection of webOS devices for those who are interested.
So if you are in the area, why not go along?
If you can’t make it, you can follow along via the and TouchPads are available remotely at
Discussion is at the . You can read more .
Picture Credit: .
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By pivotCE
Sooo that was a really long time since a release, but
link hidden, please login to view are still around and active as ever! We have continued making updates and producing testing images. But a lot happened that resulted in us not putting out a proper release out in the past few years.
Those who have stayed in touch with the community will know there has been some turmoil with the closure of the webOS Nation forums last year. Things stabilised over the last year as people converged around the and made plans on the associated . Much of the old information from webOS Nation was preserved thanks to the and can still be accessed, if imperfectly. We have now set up a that largely replicates the old layout and is ready for fresh content.
If you are eager to find out what we’ve been working on and to try out the new release, read on…
The (Jenkins) builder infrastructure we had available previously decided to have a number of malfunctions, leading it to be no longer available to us. So for now we’re back to our own builders for building all the images, which isn’t great, but at least we’re still building and providing images! We are now using , which means newer base components like systemd, pulseaudio and wayland.
Since the last release LuneOS has gone through a major rework under the hood. To summarize:
We moved from Qt5 to (6.5.2 included in this release). We have moved away from our own compositor (luna-next) to the one provided by LG in called luna-surfacemanager. We are now using LG’s WAM (WebAppManager) instead of our own custom one together with LG’s fork of Chromium (94). A major rebase of all components shared with webOS OSE to be based on the now. This included a migration to Enhanced ACG which provides a lot tighter security for LS2 calls from apps and services. This all was an enormous amount of work behind the screens but little visible to the end user, however this does offer clear benefits going forward being:
A shared code-base with LG, which means less custom components and maintenance. Years of field tested code on LG production devices which offers more stability. In this process we were able to keep backwards compatibility for apps and services. Easier to upgrade to latest OSE components, since we have migrated almost all remaining components that were still not based on the latest webOS OSE or on Open webOS. (125 components were migrated in total, 15 components are still to be migrated). In the meanwhile we have also been working hard to support the newly released devices such as the PinePhone, PinePhonePro and PineTab2 which are affordable devices which can run a very close to mainline kernel and a multitude of OS-es. We now support booting off on Pinephone.
The new close to mainline kernel for the Pine64 devices allows them to run things like out of the box!
All other supported Android devices are now based on 9.0.
So what is ahead for the near future?
Our focus will be on the mainline devices and emulator (), however we will try to keep support for the Android/Halium based targets as well.
Upgrade to latest Chromium 108 released by LG recently Work on audio & multimedia infrastructure provided by webOS OSE to get it working in LuneOS Work on camera infrastructure Try to get a mainline kernel working for Tenderloin, Hammerhead, Mido and Tissot. Improve/add QML components and add new basic apps to be used such as Camera, Flashlight, Audio Player, Video Player Piggyback off some of the work done by the . Provide a GSI image for newer Android (9.0+) based devices, this would allow a standard image to boot on most modern Android devices v.s. building a device specific one for each device. Known issues:
Battery usage is on the high side No audio in webapps (we decided not to spend time on this, seeing we plan to update Chromium soon anyway) The Usual:
Sign up for. Get involved and [ UPDATE https://pivotce.com/2014/09/22/webos-ports-help-wanted/ ] Feel free to download the updated builds to get started. Currently supported targets: PinePhone, PinePhonePro, PineTab2, Qemux86-64 (Virtualbox), all with mainline kernel. Tenderloin, Hammerhead, Tissot, Mido, Rosy, Mako (Android 9.0/Halium based with their respective Android kernels (3.4 and newer)). RaspberryPi 3 and RaspberryPi4 might work too, however we haven’t tested this ourselves.
. And remember we don’t do timelines.
Don’t forget to contact us with any questions and feel free to join the discussion on the . Catch us on Twitter @webosports on IRC: Libera:#webos-ports, or email [email protected].
We will see you shortly again with a new release!
Picture credit: from Pixabay
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