Thumb drive draws too much power on keyboard port

Question

My keyboard supported usb thumb drives in the past.  Suddenly it is giving not enought power errors if I insert thumb drives, iPhone or iPod into either of the ports on the keyboard.  These devices work just fine if plugged into the computer.
Has anyone had this problem or solved it?

Answer 1

I remember when I bought the Camera Connection Kit for my iPad2, there were several undocumented functions that you could do with it besides just transfer image files from a digital camera.  I think you could hook up a wired keyboard to the iPad (and use it), and attach USB sticks, and they worked.  But, then came an iPad update, and all that extra stuff miraculously stopped working, to be replaced with the "insufficent power" error message.
I finally found a blog posting that said they had changed a power consumption number in a single line of code and this stopped all the extra things from working.  Something like changing a number from 50 down to 20 somethings.
I seem to recall that their explanation for dumbing down the undocumented functionality was that these extra devices would decrease the battery life of the iPad.  Hmmm... I come from the PC environment where we say, "Well, let me make that decision and not you!"