Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog
Hi Ken, very interesting post and discussion. I am a bit of an impostor here, as I am typing on a laptop (PC), - an HP 625 to be exact. So here's the thing, this is my son's laptop, he is severely autistic and as such puts things through a heavy duty cycle - I have replaced the screen 5 times, the chassis twice, now on an ssd hard-drive, several dvd drives leter etc. So the power jack has been broken and I soldered a new one onto the motherboard. Done it several times now. Realized, that this was not the solution, so I looked at the build your own magsafe at hackaday. Looked a bit complicated. Then I thought, could I get a mac power jack and build it into the laptop taking out the 56.6k modem (never used). Well, £5 bought me a jack and I bought the magsafe cable intending to spice it onto the HP625 power supply. checking the voltages and wattage I realized a mac power supply was essentially the same as the HP. I put it all together, but for some reason the little LED on the magsafe connector wasn't lighting up, and the battery wasn't charging - v. frustrating! Reading your teardown and the feedback from the good people here I was tempted to try mucking about with that middle pin. Then I tried taking the battery out of the laptop, pluggging in the magsafe and switching on. Well, it all powered up, running through the magsafe and apple PSU. Great! I powered it down, put the battery back in (with the magsafe and apple PSU), powered up - hey presto battery now charging. Problem all solved.
Thank you so much everyone who contributed to this page - giving me the inspiration I needed - and good luck with all your projects!
Feb 15, 2016, 4:00:40 PM
Posted to Teardown and exploration of Apple's Magsafe connector