Powermat Your Phone (in This Case My HTC Arrive)

This was actually surprisingly easy to do.

If you do not know Powermat is a "wireless" charging station. You need the station and you need the unit for your phone.

The stations come in a 3 unit, 2 unit or single mat. You can buy the thing together as in a single mat and phone back or individually.

The idea is instead of having to plug in your phone, you just place it on top and it charges it with almost no wires. Now the problem is unless you have a iPhone chances are you have to use a power cube which means you still have to plug your phone in to a cube. That defeats the whole purpose.

Now i have a Sprint HTC Arrive (Windows Phone FTW) which means they do not have a compatible back plate for my phone.

My phone gets pretty decent battery life and i dont mind charging it at home like i usually do. What i do hate is charging it in my car. So (future upcoming instructable) i thought it would be really cool to have one in my car's center console. But first i need the backing.

Now i looked at others (Energizer, Duracell) and the one that looked the easiest was Powermat. How theirs work is that you replace your battery cover with their cover and you have to kind of keep it plugged it into your usb port to charge like normal.

So first thing you need is to find a powermat phone backing that has the plug matching yours. Easy you think, just about all of them use micro usb now. Ah but HTC has their oriented differently than say Samsung or Motorola, so if you have a HTC phone you need to find the back cover for HTC Evo 4g, because HTC HD2 will not work.

So what you need:

Powermat station
Powermat phone cover
Dremel Drill / Snips of some kind.
Phone case

Now i got lucky and Best Buy has the HTC Evo 4g backing with the single station for $19.99! Thats like half off! So i bought two. But they are on clearance so be quick.

Step 1: Take It Apart

Now open your box, get to the backing and you will see that it is covered in a sticker.

Take that sticker off and you will see the wiring. Then take the board off.

Its all stuck on there with adhesive so comes off rather easy.

Now you will see the first problem, if you look at the connector its 'one sided' meaning it is using the case for the other side to hold the plug in.

My Arrive has a keyboard, meaning it has a bit of a back. So I check to see if it will fit.

Fits very nicely for me. I even placed the receiver on the pad to make sure it charges. The only problem is the bevel of my phone puts the connector at a bit of a angle, and with no other side to the connector it very easily loses connection. Will have to fix that

Now i see how well my case will hit with the receiver in between, not to bad.

This might come together easily

Step 2: Trim to Fit and Done!

Now the receiver is pretty thin, but the case was meant to hug snugly.

The back of my case  has a bit of a felt cover, so i took that out for a bit more room.

I had to start trimming out for the usb connector. Now i could just glue it all together and not worry about it but that would not be smart. I still need to be able to remove the backing if this fails, and have access to the usb port. So i start trimming away making the area on the case around the usb wider. After a few resizes it fits together pretty nicely. The receiver creates a slight misalignment depending on where in the case you stuck it. But there is a nice spot in the middle where its pretty unnoticeable. Not bad i did not have to dig into the backing.

Now i was hoping the pressure from the backing would keep a good connection since the connector only had one side but it was not so. Using hot glue, so i could remove it some what easy if needed I slowly glue around the connector to back of the actual phone. Was not my first choice in case i had to take of the backing a lot, but it ended up just fine.

Now i carefully snapped the backing back on and tested it out. Wow that was pretty easy.

Now im still messing with it and testing it out but so far for $19.99 this was a pretty nice deal.

Step 3: Update

Ok so i have been using this for a couple of months now and have been really enjoying it.

But when putting it together i cut a few corners by putting a lot of stress of the fasteners that hold the case to the back of the phone.

Now this didn't bother me because i like a thick phone but one day i dropped it and the stress was to much and snapped all of the connectors off the case.

So now having to get a new case and also finding out they no one seams to have that case any more and knowing how much i really liked this mod i decided to spend more time working on it and make it perfect.

They did not have that type of case anymore so i had to find another rather thick one, Sprint had a body glove which is the same company that made my last case but it was a different type. I had this type on my Touch Pro for along time and liked it so i took it.

Its this type: http://www.amazon.com/Body-Glove-Snap-Case-Arrive/dp/B0050D1LW8/

Now i kept the smooth plastic front of the old one and used the back of the new case.

Step 4: Carving

I should edit this and hide my first attempt but maybe keeping it would be useful.

So first i remove the felt off the back of the case then place the power charger and mark around it for dremeling out

I then dremeled it out as deep as i could, this case has some type of like grip backing and so parts went right to that grip material but it never broke through

I then made the plug area bigger and wide the same way as i did last time. I also dremeled it out a space for it to fit into, which actually saved me a lot of work for later so i got lucky on that.

Step 5: Together Again

Now then you just have to put the back case back on I find it easier to put the back case on if you plug in the connector to both parts that way it lines up easy

Carefully press case back on and check the tabs, they should go together easily and connect everywhere. The tabs to snap in place with very little force.

Now with the plug in place place it on the mat and see if it charges. If your lucky like i was this time it should charge right up.

If you are unlucky and it does not connect you will have to play with it by dremeling out more or maybe even filling it in and using glue like i had to do the first time until it connects.

And there you have it the improved version, works great so far so good luck on yours