Monday, February 13, 2023

DIY making OTG with power supply for Fire Stick.

This article will help make these -






This has been tested on Fire TV stick 3rd generation 2021. It has only one USB micro port and that's for plugging its own 5v 1A adapter. There are already many cables available in market but making it is so simple that those who cannot buy new cable for any reason can make it.

Items required:
- OTG micro cable or OTG adapter.
- USB cable to tear and join with otg.

Pic 1


Picture 1 shows an OTG cable and a usb cable. The usb cable can be a usb charging cable or data cable.

As shown in pic 1 carefully cut the otg cable to take out 4 wires. The RED is +ve, BLACK is -ve. Do not cut the white, green wires. USB data will transfer from those wires NOT usb power. The red and black wires will provide power to both fire stick and usb device. Now join the power supply wires of usb cable to otg cable as shown in pic 2.

Pic 2


Now test all wires they should not short with other wire colors. In case your usb has different colors then you must check the +ve & -ve wires using multimeter or other method. Now pack the wires with tape etc as shown in pic 3.


The micro port connects to fire stick and white usb male goes to adapter and female usb port can be used to plug pen drive, gamepad, wireless dongle etc.

Warning: do not connect high power devices like external hard disk to otg. The fire stick adapter only supplies 5 watt of power and any device having high requirements will shutdown whole setup. For connecting high power devices use higher power adapter.

Note: This otg may cause the fire stick to suddenly reboot from "Loading..." Screen. Even if this happens try again it can work or try to change adpaters.

One thing i have noticed this setup sometimes works sometimes fire stick reboots from loading screen. But it works when i use fire stick adapter. This might be due to power supply difference. Fire stick says only connect 5 volt 1 Ampere adapter. For this reason we should make a setup which supplies 5w power to fire stick and higher power to usb device via external supply. Like only connecting data wires of otg to usb device and different power wires to fire stick and different power wires to usb female port or simply provide high Ampere from adapter but use small current restriction circuit to allow 1A to go to fire stick. This is not needed but i am not sure what causes reboots. Once fire stick boots to UI then it doesn't reboots.

I have tested this cable with wireless keyboard & mouse dongles, pendrive, external hard disk, ps2 to usb gamepad adapter.


Fire stick issue with some gamepads:
When i connect ps2 gamepad using ps2 to usb adapter it handles button 1 & 2 for shortcut. Button 1 for launching custom app and button 2 to Bluetooth devices list. This makes the gamepad useless. This means any input which has button 1 & button 2 unique IDs will behave same ways and cannot be used. Will always launch shortcut apps. This can be solved but i am simply using BT gamepads. This issue doesn't happen with XInput and Direct Input gamepads.