Brownie points today for Chris Paget, a reverse engineering expert who has disclosed a way to make his Motorola Droid host USB-enabled devices, a hack that for the first time allows the smartphone – running on the Google Android OS – to directly connect to printers, video cameras, TV tuners, and a wide variety of other peripherals.

TheRegister reports that the modification was devised by Mike Kershaw from Kismet and Mike Baker of OpenWRT and shared with the world by Paget, a new Droid owner and chief hacker for reverse engineering firm H4RDW4RE.

As a further PCWorld report notes, “To get your Motorola Droid to work as a host for other peripherals you’ll need three cables: a car charging cable, a Micro USB cable, and a USB extender cable, all readily available at a Verizon store or a local electronics store. Once you’ve spliced, soldered, removed a resistor, and plugged the resulting FrankenCable to your phone, all you have to do is reboot and type one command into terminal to start having peripherals be recognised by your Droid.”

For full details you can go to Paget’s blog here, where he reveals that, “Once your Droid is booted, pull up a terminal and look at dmesg – after plugging in your USB peripheral using the cable you made earlier you should see the usual kernel notifications about new USB devices being connected; they’ll also turn on (or start charging) if they’re powered by USB.”

With a hint of caution he also adds that, “You’ll only be able to plug in one peripheral before the port reverts to peripheral mode; you’ll have to reboot with the micro-dongle if you want to go back into host mode. Also, if you leave the micro-dongle plugged in too long it triggers another bug, the port gets stuck supplying power to devices but not actually recognising them. Hopefully the drivers are sufficiently open-source that these are easy bugs to squash, and that dynamically switching between host mode and peripheral mode won’t be too hard to add either.”