Outdoor Technology Turtle Shell Speaker Mod - Proper Micro USB Charger Port

     I have had an Outdoor Technology Turtle Shell bluetooth speaker since December last year.  It is a cool little speaker I am pleased with, small, but powerful enough for quiet or small gatherings of people and has good low end response which is generally lacking on small size speakers.  It is splash resistant and lightweight, I have taken it kayaking to have with me at a backcountry site. 

     The only one thing that bugged me when I initially got the Turtle Shell speaker and opened the box was the fact that it uses a USB charger cord with a strange nonstandard connector.  Looking for quite a while online for what the connector is called,  it looks like it is what is called an 8 pin mini USB cable..  in any case it certainly isn’t the connector that will charge your cell phone, which is typically a USB micro B connector, although from afar, they look similar.  My problem with using a nonstandard cable is you always have to keep track of where it is all the time, and make sure you bring it with you if you travel somewhere and want to charge it, rather than use whatever you use to charge your phone.  I have enough electronics I have chargers all over the place and several different cables as it is, I don’t understand their logic in designing this speaker with a strange cord.  Especially if all you need is power to charge something, why not use a widely used standard connector?

     As it was, it was frustrating to always locate the cable and keep track of it when I traveled. But, my apprehension with this nonstandard cable was confirmed when,while I was camping the connector on the cable cracked.  I had it in a box with a bunch of camping stuff in it and it probably got crushed by a cast iron grill I had in the box.  It doesn’t help that the connector was a lower cost plastic connector instead of a higher quality rubberized connector.  In any case, the connector in the cable was toast. 

     So, now I couldn’t charge the speaker because my cable was busted.  I was going to just order a new cable from Outdoor Technology, since they had it listed for “$5 for cable, shipped, nuff said” as they say on their website, but firstly, they didn’t have any in stock, and secondly they wanted to charge me $10 extra to ship it to Canada, no thanks.  So my frustration led me to purchase some USB micro B surface mount female connectors off of eBay for $5 including shipping, instead, and I decided to modify the speaker to put a proper micro USB port on it so I don’t have any more issues with forgetting to bring the charger cable along or breaking it.

     The lower rubber casing comes off easily if you slide a table knife along the bottom near the switch location to pry it off, then it can be pulled off. The bottom plastic housing is removed with six screws, revealing three circuit boards, the two speakers and attached to the bottom plate is the battery.  I removed the ribbon to the charger/input jack board, unscrewed the board from the upper housing and desoldered the charger jack.  I managed to solder on a Micro USB jack upside down and connect it to the charger leads on the board after a few attempts.  It was easier to solder upside down, as the power and ground were on their corresponding sides when soldered upside down.   

    If you haven’t soldered micro electronics (which I hadn’t in a long  while), it is tricky to solder things that are so small by hand – they are designed for machine wave soldering.  I have a part holder/magnifying glass which is useful for confirming that things are soldered properly.  For wires, I stripped some speaker cable and used 4 strands of bare wire.  I had to desolder the two inductors right near the old jack so the Vcc line didn’t short out on the grounded frame of the new jack, which happened on one of the jacks.  I almost gave up because of various soldering and grounding issues, but after I desoldered the inductor on the Vcc line, it worked perfectly.

     While I was at it, I used the hot soldering iron to widen the hole in the case slightly to fit the marginally wider micro USB connector.  I put the thing back together after that, and it works great!   It doesn't exactly look OEM but it works just fine.  It probably took me about 4 hours of soldering and fiddling with it. Just plug it into my computer or wall charger and it works, with no special cables required.

Update:  The newer version of the turtle shell speaker has this standard micro USB and not the nonstandard version my original turtle shell speaker came with.

Powerfilm USB+AA Solar Charger Review

I decided to get one of these for my latest canoe trip to Temagami – I was curious and thought it would hopefully kill two birds with one stone – charge my smartphone which I primarily use for occasionally listening to music, and charge AA batteries for my GPS.  It cost me around $100 from MEC.  But after using it for a week, honestly, I don’t know if this thing is more trouble than it’s worth.  Possibly it would be good for very long multi-week trips, but for anything within a week, just bring some extra batteries.

Made of ballistic nylon, this charger has a slot for two AA batteries to charge when unrolled.  It has 4 solar panels, and a USB port on one side of it.  It is somewhat light, measuring 135 grams on my scale, but the performance isn’t all that awesome, to be honest.  In ideal conditions - full sun, light falling 90 degrees to the panels, it apparently puts out .4Amps.  That means it would take over 6 hours to charge a fully discharged set of EneloopXX  AAbatteries… and again let me remind you that this is under ideal conditions which it rarely would be when traveling in the backcountry, so best hopes are to charge one set of AA batteries in an entire day.  While traveling canoeing/portaging/camping, I found myself having to fiddle with it regularlyto make sure it was exposed to the sun, that is when the sun was available.

As for operation - the charger has a small LED on one side of it.  It flashes slowly when charging, is solid when the batteries are deemed charged, and flashes quickly if it thinks there’s a battery problem. I find the LED not that visible.  It can only be seen from the one side where it’s located.  Then,  there’s the USB charging.  It requires the AA batteries be in the unit for the USB charger to work properly (and both AA batteries be at the same charge).  At first that seems strange, but I suppose it makes sense, to ensure the USB wouldn’t be powering on and off if the sun dipped behind some clouds.  The AA batteries can charge the USB device when there is not even any sun at the end of the day.

 I find several flaws in the design… firstly there is the weight of it.  I assume this product is for backpacking and backcountry use, otherwise someone would be using an auto charger or something else, but the design isn’t really optimized for weight, like most backpacker oriented products are, nowadays.  I could easily redesign it myself to take out at least half the weight (or better yet add more panels for the same weight to get much quicker charging).  There really is no need for the ballistic nylon – much lighter ripstip would do, it’s not like you are rubbing this thing up against something else while using it….  Or at least you would have to try hard to do that.  Also there’s an additional superfluous flap of nylon that really serves no purpose, other than to wrap the thing up for storage, and there’s a thick bar of plastic screwed to the top which also serves no purpose either, other than to stick the instruction label to.  The back side has an overly thick electronics housing on the back.  I find the AA socket terrible due to the fact it’s very hard to remove the batteries without resorting to finding an object to pry them out of the housing, because the spring is a high force and buries the nose of the battery almost flush with the surrounding housing.  In addition to that making it difficult to remove the batteries is the door, which only opens 90 degrees and thus makes it impossible for me to slap-remove batteries, like I do for almost all handheld devices that use batteries – my remotes, GPS, phone, etc, I take the battery cover off and slap it to instantly remove the batteries without needing to dig them out with fingernails or pry the batteries out.  In any case the 90 degree door makes it impossible to slap remove the batteries.

There’s also the waterproofness of it…. the electronic board isn’t conformal coated which it should be for outdoor use for moisture protection.  It also says it is not waterproof at all, although it should not suffer much damage unless constantly submerged with batteries in it.  Any product like this should surely be able to withstand being left outside in the rain.    Lastly, I also don’t know why it only supports AA and not AAA batteries.  Almost all popular headlamps nowadays use AAA batteries, and there’s no reason for it to not support AAA format – almost any other AA charger can support AAA charging nowadays.

I honestly wanted to like this charger at the outset and think it is useful to carry on trips, but in practice it is only marginally useful… like I said, at least for trips up to a week +, I think someone would probably be better off just carrying some extra batteries until the weight, power output, ease of battery removal, and AAA battery support is improved.  You could carry 4 extra charged AA batteries for the same weight of this charger.