Aliexpress is a treasure trove of this sort of thing. Unfortunately, product listings don't last that long, and often things get relisted under different names, so, you have to dig for what you want.
The "blow stuff up" is a specific mode where you tell the source and sink to ignore what they negotiated and do whatever you program the decide to fake instead. Which, if you're not careful, could be out of spec for either or both devices, causing said damage. In normal use,
it's a semi-passive monitor/reporting box.
I think the nice Weller irons are using 24 volts DC between the box and the tip. Why deal with filtering and conversion to run a PID temperature controller, which you'll need anyway to get a mains iron to run as precisely as a high-end device?
Can’t speak for the OP but having USB C devices is far tidier, and allows you to go portable.
I’ve always had a 110 soldering station, but recently bought a Pinecil portable iron for soldering in the field, and damn that thing is so convenient and fast to heat and accurate, I hardly bother with my full solder station any more
It’s actually good? It’s so inexpensive. My soldering station was $200, and I thought that was on the cheaper side. It looks like Pinecil V2 is only $25 at the moment.
I think these will do fine my nice soldering iron was $70ish when I got it and has temperature control. You don't need a weller or anything that was nice from back in the day, I think the in general temp control is very good from my experience with cheap ecigs too.
My electronics background is that I worked under Underwriters Laboratories where I’ve used some very nice soldering irons.
The pinecil is unbelievably good for what it costs. I find myself using it more than any other soldering iron, only pulling out bigger more expensive models when I need more thermal mass. I can’t recommend it enough.
Just a mention that if it isn't working up to spec you probably dont have a power source capable of delivering what it needs, it truly blew me away how good this thing is.
If they’d charged me $85 I’d be a very happy buyer. But I paid like $45 or something crazy?
The one downside someone pointed out is that replacement tips are pricey because they seem to include the actual heating element, but even then it’s still such a great device IMO
Depends on the tip quality. The one I got with my toolcraft soldering station lasted a good while, but any replacements I get just freaking melt away and are only good for a few uses. On the other hand they are $3 for a pack of 10, so it's probably still cheaper overall than the OEM stuff lol.
It's amazing, both in general, and especially for its price. I have four of them (not exactly Pinecils, but two Pinecils, a TS-100, a TS-80, etc). I love it.
If your soldering iron uses the old style of slip-on tips, then the Pinecil would represent a significant upgrade. Cartridge-style tips have really rendered older irons obsolete and allow something as cheap and simple as a Pinecil to have genuinely excellent performance.
Brands like AiXun and Handskit make inexpensive stations that are compatible with JBC C215/C245 cartridges, which gives you a ridiculous level of performance for the price.
Also, don't sleep on knife tips. For a long time I thought that the Chinese phone repair guys were goofy for using them so much, but they were right, I was an idiot and I now use them 99% of the time.
Because then you can only sell to countries that have 110V mains. All three of them.
If your product is more complex than a light bulb, dealing with mains power can be quite a hassle. It requires bigger and more expensive parts than negotiating for 20V DC with a USB PD source.
You might want to take a look at USB-C to barrel connector adapters intended to run older laptops on modern chargers. They are tiny and cheap, I use one to liberate a thunderbolt 4 hub from the massive power brick it came with.
> It’s not a massive problem, but I do only have one 65W USB-C supply coming into workbench. I want more, I want much much more!
>There don’t seem to be any powered USB-C hubs, so I went shopping on AliExpress and eventually came across this nice board:
Are they UL listed? With that kind of watts, seems like they are capable of starting a fire and burning down your home if not properly designed, manufactured, tested, etc.
No, but workbench stuff like this would be powered on when you're actively there and working on something, so if it did go pop and potentially catch fire at least you're nearby.
Both soldering irons and multimeters, tools typically used on workbenches have time out/auto off features because EE work is performed by fallible humans that accidentally leave things plugged in and turned on when not actively monitoring things. Sometimes even intentionally, to test things like battery discharge rates.
I don't understand how you can power all of these at full power when the input voltage is a single ~30v DC wall adapter? Isn't that your bottleneck right there?
Well, I guess that's the difference between "chassis wiring" and "power transmission" in the table at https://www.powerstream.com/Wire_Size.htm
It's about how long your wires are going to be, and a desktop electronic project has at least orders of magnitude smaller cable than a van, I'd say.
> Announced in 2021, the USB PD Revision 3.1 specification is a major update to enable delivering up to 240W of power over full featured USB Type-C® cable and connector. Prior to this update, USB PD was limited to 100W using a solution based on 20V using USB Type-C cables rated at 5A. The USB Type-C specification has also been updated to Release 2.1 to define 240W cable requirements, and with the updated USB PD protocol and power supply definition, this extends the applicability of USB power delivery to a large number of applications where 100W wasn't adequate.
That's not what the article is talking about. The article is talking about needing more outputs, not higher powered output.
I do look forward to future iterations of boards like this that support usb-c input. Weird as that is. Basically a power breakout board. And heck, why not throw some usb hubs on it all too?
I think someday it would be amazing to have 1500W to 3000W kettles simply being powered by Type C, and other home appliances too. Wall sockets in most places in the house could simply be the universal Type C port, and since Type C does power negotiation, it'll be safe to connect a low-power appliance to a high-power Type C outlet.
The key requirement for this (after the spec comes along) would be high quality high-power rated Type C cables, and safe high-power Type C outlets. No need for each appliance to have different sorts of cables (mostly irreplaceable and fixed length) which don't fit some outlets correctly.
Maybe after some regulations, it would even be easy to update the firmware of those home appliances to open source alternatives.
Interesting idea, I suspect it isn't possible with the existing connector. You either need to increase the voltage or the current.
The new 240W spec is 5A and 50V. Assuming 5A is the thermal limit of the connector and that can't change, to get 1500W you'd need 300V, which is probably higher than the connector can support in terms of conductor spacing.
At uni we learned that 30V can penetrate skin in the right (wrong?) conditions. Once it's through the skin, your body conducts really well, so even a tiny amount of current can stop your heart. But you need a path for the current to get across your heart, so I'm guessing that even if 30V gets under your skin, you'd have to be pretty unlucky for it to form a circuit through your heart.
Maybe you can get there if the device doesn’t actually require a steady stream of 1500W. For example, induction stovetops often work with cycling their coils. Couple the idea of a charge pump, a whole bank of capacitors and Tesla’s trick of running cables over spec by constantly monitoring temperature and making on-the-fly adjustments, and you might get somewhere.
You may be able to run cables 50-100% over spec for a short time. But not 1000%. Thought experiment (don't try at home!): Take a random USB cable and short circuit a car battery. It will start burning within seconds.
The point is that USB-C is used by a LOT of devices that are NOT iPhone and that draw significantly more power, therefore its reasonble to explore standardizing any decive that can fit the specs wattage limitations. The more devices that can be charged from the same cable and plug would solve several problems not the least of which is reducing environment waste.
I have a bag at home scores of AC to DC adapters and cables.
> Also I really don't want people to try to run electric
> kettles over iPhone USB charging cord.
The USB-C PD cables have circuitry in them that negotiates with both endpoints, and declares "yes, I'm okey with transporting 100W".
Whereas I can trivially rewire my kettle in 5 minutes to use headphone wires instead of the properly sized wires it needs, and people routinely do the equivalent of that, e.g. extending their oven, microwave or kettle's cable with the cheapest extension cord they can find.
So it would actually be significantly safer, you can make a USB-PD wire that says it accepts 100W, but actually just melts, but doing so requires significantly more moronic perseverance than doing the equivalent with an under-rated extension cord.
Spec compliant USB-C PD cables have circuitry in them that negotiates with both endpoints, and declares "yes, I'm okay with transporting 100W".
Most people aren't making their own cables and programming what they accept into them. They're just using whatever cables they have that works. If you were a business owner and profit was your short term motive, and you had a factory making different cables supporting different wattages, would it be easier to program the specific firmware that should be on each cable, or just program all cables so they say they "support" the max? Shortcuts like that are not theoretical - ethernet cards are supposed to be programmed with unique MAC addresses, but we've seen out in the wild, MACs be the same on batches of cards, or set to all zeros.
When it's 240W the stakes are lower than when it's 3000W.
Because someone released Ethernet cards with duplicate MAC addresses, we should conclude that a future hypothetical USB-PD spec capable of powering a kettle would be more prone to failure than the status quo of bringing your own extension cord?
Electric cords don't need to self-declare their capabilities, USB-PD cables do. So the odds of a mistake on the manufacturer side are lower, as you'd need to pair an incapable wire with the wrong E-Mark chip.
For an extension cord to melt and catch fire all you need to do is for the customer to misread a label, or more likely not read one at all.
If we're talking about the short-term motives of sociopaths, your hypothetical factory will have an even easier time labeling headphone wires as capable of carrying 16A. They don't need to fraudulently manufacture one with the wrong E-Mark chip, just slap a new sticker on the box they're shipped in.
I'm as frustrated with the confusion around USB-C as anyone, but I don't think we need to worry that the problems associated with race-to-the bottom manufacturers in the 15W space are going to extend to 100W, 240W, or hypothetical 3000W cables. The price point, serious failure modes, and potential liability will all serve as moats.
I automatically assume any and all USB cables, including and especially those with USB-C plugs, are non-compliant wires of Copper where the capital C stands for "Crap" until clearly demonstrated otherwise.
There are numerous examples when the electric cables marked with a proper gauge for the load are actually made with a thinner ones. This is exactly the problem with the extension cords and power strips which literally melt under any serious load (ie kettle and like).
Add to that what now you would need USB-PD chip in any cable, what you cannot use the cable if the chip dies, what they would go directly to the landfill.
Hell, even CAT5 ethernet cables are made of shit for decades, I personally witnessed reruns needed for the lines which were laid with a 'proper' (on the pack) cable, yet didn't work at any meaningful distance.
The cables would be chunkier but not THAT weird looking. The connectors on the other hand would be wild. You'd have a cluster of deeply shielded contacts, and mechanically actuated shutters might be employed. I have no idea how you would address wet environments other than "GFCI everything"
That's why power hungry devices are usually connected to a three phase plug. This aside, I think the best would have most outlet keeping the current national standards (let's not forget they deliver AC which is still need by a decreasing number of electric motors) and add a second residential DC circuit using a USB-C outlet
It's the EMI shield coupling inside the power supply, see [0]. Shouldn't happen with properly grounded chargers (but the charger in question is probably two-pronged without a ground pin, like the majority of chargers).
This is assuming that only 48 V (relative to ground) were present on the cable.
There are many ways in which low quality power supplies can expose up to full main power voltage on the secondary side. For example, with 230 V on Vbus and 225 V on "ground", an USB device might not even be able to tell the difference.
A compliant USB-C device or power supply is not allowed to expose anything other than 3-5.5V of Vconn on one of the configuration pins.
Only if it senses an upstream-facing port of another device will it expose 5V of Vbus, let alone 20 V (or more recently 48 V) via PD, which would require a complex handshake to prevent exactly that situation (i.e. electric shocks or arcing) from arising.
As others have already said, what you're experiencing is likely an improperly designed power supply (that can happen even with plain old USB-A battery charging and has caused deadly accidents in the past!) or static electricity.
USB-C is currently specified for 1.25 amps per pin at 48 volts. If you decide you don't need any data wires and make all 24 pins hot, with the shield as the return path, that's already 1500 watts. And I'm sure you could tweak it to get somewhat more.
Afaik the power cables are substantially thicker than the data ones (and likely better isolated). There's also only 8 unique connections: power, ground and 6 data lines. At best you could get 3x the power with the same pinout.
In this case, you would presumably make the devices start in the legacy 5V USB pinout, then only switch to sending power over the data pins when the source, cable, and sink all confirm they're specced for it. That should mean there's no protocol incompatibility any more than USB PD is an incompatible protocol.
> I think someday it would be amazing to have 1500W to 3000W kettles simply being powered by Type C, and other home appliances too.
I've actually jokingly suggested that USB will go this way. You'll plug in your new induction cooktop with a USB cable you fished out of the junk drawer and all of the LEDs and screens will light up. However, the second you turn a zone on the cable melts and burns your house down because the cable didn't support the USB-HPD-IH 2.3 Gen2x120 spec.
I don't believe the tiny plugs will ever be able to do that. The European power sockets ("schuko", type E/F) usually run with 230V and 13A (even 253V/16A is technically allowed), so up to 3000W and more.
They can get really warm when run at full power. If the sockets are worn out they can even get hot enough to melt the plastic. A few electric car owners experienced that, when they charged their car on a regular socket. (with the higher voltage in Europe it's feasible to charge a car on a standard socket, 0-100% can take as "little" as 20 to 30 hours.)
So I highly doubt those currents could every be delivered on such a tiny and brittle connector. 240W already seems like pushing it to the limits. Higher voltages seem impossible too, there is not enough space for isolation. Small mechanical faults could easily expose those dangerous voltages to the user.
Is there no such thing as a fused schuko plug? All of my plugs are G type, and since they all* have fuses, I never put much thought into limiting the amount of current I'm going to pull through a cable.
Fuses don't help with overheating cables/sockets that run well within the specs. Schuko is rated for 16A peak, still most chargers only run it with 10A or 13A. I had a nearly melting socket already with 10A.
Most electric car charges nowadays can sense overheating by a decrease in voltage (i've seen a voltage drop from 225V to 205V within a few minutes, and the charger immediately limited the current to 6A). And a lot of them also monitor the temperature of the cables and the plugs.
Now the real issues enters the game: extension cords. If the temperature issues happens on the other side of the extension cord, maybe 20-50m away the charger still measures perfectly fine temperatures on the plug. But the socket the extension cord is plugged in may be already burning.
That's why you should never ever (!) charge an electric car on a Schuko extension cord. Even if everything is in perfectly working condition and rated for 16A.
Why would the cable/socket overheat if it's within spec? I thought that was the whole point of using fuses in the first place.
Roll-out extension leads are extra dangerous though, even if fused. I have a relative that had to jump out of a second floor window on a construction site when someone set all of their batteries charging on a wrapped up extension lead, which rapidly started a fire. I assume it happened faster than the thermal cutoff could trigger.
Why would a car crash if the speed limit is obeyed?
There are many factors that can lead to overheating. Like damaged sockets, Plugs not plugged in fully, dirty plugs/sockets, cheap/old sockets that don't fulfil the specs, wear in sockets that leads to not enough pressure on the pins and smaller contact surface, ...
> I think someday it would be amazing to have 1500W to 3000W kettles simply being powered by Type C
Well this is very unlikely to happen.
To deliver more power, you either need to increase voltage, or increase current.
- The higher the voltage, the easier an electric arc can form between two wires. Cables and connectors are voltage rated depending on the clearance/spacing between their components. USB-C is very compact, it is unlikely it could be used for more than say 20V without starting to create arc issues.
- Increasing current means increasing wire gauge, otherwise the cables will just burn. Ultimately "beefing" USB cables will make them clunky and rigid to the point where it will defeat its purpose. The connectors would need to be bigger as well, to a point where these new high power connectors wouldn't fit regular USB-C connectors.
Note to future self: get some 240V "north american style" sockets installed in my future North American kitchen. And slice off the euro cord on from a euro kettle and wire on a north american style 240v cord+socket.
I actually looked into this for making coffee while camping. How hard would it be to boil water with a portable battery pack that contains a few 18650 cells? Regardless of the fact that USB-C at 240W is not really enough, could you do it on batteries?
Not very well. It takes a shitload of energy to boil a cup of water. About 0.5MJ for 8 ounces raised from 20C to 100C. My portable battery pack holds about 100Wh of energy. That's 360,000J. So that battery pack has enough energy to boil one cup of water and not quite a second one. And that assumes 100% efficiency.
I realize that we're talking about two different things: wall outlets vs. batteries, but boiling water is hard.
I'd add to that including a more sophisticated power negotiation system. Say I've got an electric griddle and a microwave oven on the same circuit. To maintain the temperature I've set the griddle to requires an average of 750 watts. I'm cooking something on the griddle and I want to microwave something else in the microwave for 1 minute. The microwave draws 1000 watts.
1000 watts + 750 watts = 1750 watts, which is fine for 1 minute on a standard 125 V 15 outlet.
But that griddle averages 750 watts. It is actually cycling between 1500 watts and 0 watts. 1000 watts + 1500 watts = 2500 watts. That's way over the rating for the outlet.
The griddle and the microwave and the house's power controller should be able to coordinate so that when I try to use the microwave it happens when the griddle is in an off part of its cycle.
>Wall sockets in most places in the house could simply be the universal Type C port
I absolutely hope such a hellish future does not come to pass.
Why?
Because USB-C ports will physically die long before any electrical wall socket design currently in use ever will. A good wall socket will serve its purpose for centuries over millions if not trillions of insertion cycles performed by the dumbest ape this side of the galaxy.
Great board, nice. It's so great that so many of these super small peripherals which would otherwise have walllwarts either just work with usb-c or can use a real simple trigegerboard or pigtail adapter. It's so convenient. And everything becomes incredibly easy to run off battery to boot.
It'd be lovely to see a thermal imager of it under load, see how hot parts get & where. Total power is unspecified, but 65w out x 4 ports / 32V input is 8A, which may be possibly perhaps it can sustain but only maybe.
I did try to go find this part on the website that's silkscreened on to the board, http://diymore.cc , but didn't find it there.
I wish more things were USB-C powered. I am currently traveling and among the things I have with me are two Raspberry Pi devices. One with a touch screen, the other with a 5TiB SATA HDD in an enclosure. One of the RPi devices uses 5V power, the other 12V. Both have the same kind of barrel connector.
Guess who arrived at an AirBnB a couple of days ago, tired and just wanting to get things quickly unpacked and set up. And guess who forgot which was which of the 5V and 12V powered device and plugged the 12V power cord into the 5V device.
That’s right, this guy :(
So now my RPi powered device with the 5TiB SATA HDD does not power on anymore, and for all I know plugging the 12V power supply into it may have even broken the circuit board of the HDD, in which case it will be very expensive to get my data back as HDD circuit replacement is outside of my set of skills.
I wish all of these electronic I carry just used USB-C instead.
You're right, I guess I might as well just get some straight breakouts for a USB-C for the 5V case, but then I'll be limited to half an amp, which is probably fine for my uses, I guess.
There’s no such thing as 5V PD unless you mean 5V 5A, fyi. PD is an optionally supported standard of USB-C and the resistors are not part of PD, just the standard USB-C spec.
No, the connector you see is the receptacle, not the cable side. USB-C cables are hollow ovals, the tab is on the device.
You'd take this thing or something like it, set the DIP switches/solder bridges/jumpers appropriately, get a few 2.1x5.5 (or appropriate) barrel jack to screw terminal adapters, wrap it and a couple wires in heat shrink and hot glue it to the back of your HDD/RPi/etc, and have a USB-C plug to power your HDD adapter.
Caveat: I bought one of these boards (labeled "ZYPDE" "YZXSTUDIO") that supposedly had soft programming capability--you hold down a button for the right amount of time and it programs it to produce 5v, 9v, 15v, etc the next time you turn it on. But it never worked. It always came up in a mode where you had to push the button the right number of times to get the voltage you wanted. I like the idea of DIP switches or soldered jumpers much better.
The ironic part is that barrel jacks tried to solve your problem by being completely non-standard to the point of absurdity.
There are so many different kinds and sizes of barrel jacks that when I was trying to order one that matches a cable I had, I eventually rage quit out of exasperation when even when finally finding and ordering some that matched the specs, they didn't fit, lmao. I now power everything with XT30/60 connectors.
Every time I need to buy a new barrel type power supply I'm always looking for one with a pack to different tips. Now I've got a pile of adapter tips, I can plug just about any supply into any device.
Just buy a bag of 5.5x2.5 connectors with panel mount sockets. XT30/60s are going overboard and pretty much everything now under 19v that uses barrel coax is either 5.5x2.5/2.1 or 3.5x1.5.
Back when there were electronics stores, you could just go and buy a tip that you could try out at the store, and match it to a power supply that had the right voltage and wattage.
My problem with barrel jacks (besides the myriad diameters) is that there's also different lengths and tip shapes, like how the insulated part of the center fits.
I used the wrong tip (non original) for a network switch, and even though it felt like a perfect fit and worked, it must have been a poor enough fit to start arcing. The plug was completely melted, though luckily the gear was undamaged.
Do XT30/XT60 connectors actually have a standard yet?
I still have issues buying them from "real" distributors and manufacturers. I still can't seem to cough up an actual datasheet.
For a while, some of them had a habit of arcing and catching on fire, as well. Not a big deal when doing attended, high impact stuff like racing or robots. However, that's a BIG problem when using them for unattended power.
It's a shame that there aren't better low cost 2pos connectors. I'm partial to the LEMO style push-pull connectors or the Neutrik style twistlock connectors for "real projects" e.g..when someone has paid me money for their thing to work and keep working.
The other problem with barrel jacks is that there's current going through them all the time; iirc USB doesn't have anything or only the default 5 volt until there's been a transfer of information where the two sides indicate they can handle higher voltage/power.
Source: 14 year old managed to jam the barrel jack into his laptop's HDMI port and fucked the whole device.
That's still "only" 240W, i.e. not nearly enough to charge electric bicycles. The other direction would still be nice, i.e. for faster charging of phones mounted on the handle bar.
Many phones have been waterproof for a while now, and I've used at least one that's told me that I had moisture in the charging port, with charging being paused while that was the case.
I'd rather take my chances during the few times I need to really charge my phone in the rain over the inevitably slower charging speeds and inefficiencies that go with wireless charging, especially when the power source is also a battery.
Battery pack that big will be better served by a larger connector for power (500Wh battery can sink more than basically any USB-C source can supply),
But the big reason is it's just a big object, and using a little tiny wire and plug on a big object that can fall over is just asking for damage. There's a reason 120V plugs are the size they are, and it's not ampacity. Big connectors for big objects. Small connectors for small objects.
That being said a dual role sink -source controller on a motorized bicycle battery pack would be super convenient for charging phones on the go etc
Well, at this time every e-bike battery has a one-off charger, at best shared with other models of the same brand. It would be cool if they were a little more uniform. That would make it easier to host e-bikes in the bike room of an office or apartment building.
I think you're correctly observing that there's a hole in the available smart charging specifications around the power levels needed for motorized bikes. USB-PD is perfect for most small devices, electric cars and larger have their own protocols, but 0.5-1 kWh batteries are left in the cold. (xkcd 927:1-3)
5v, 9v, 12v, 15v, 20v - selectable with all kinds of adapters.
I had a motorized massage gun that had a 9v barrel connector, this thing worked perfectly. I can also use it to charge a 12v usb-c tablet I have that won't work with normal usb-c PD.
>may have even broken the circuit board of the HDD, in which case it will be very expensive to get my data back as HDD circuit replacement is outside of my set of skills.
That's absolutely on you for not having a backup of a HDD that gets moved and tossed around and replugged constantly.
That HDD dying suddenly is an inevitability that will have happened sooner or later.
The problem is having a reliable and secure backup system.
- Carrying an extra HDD with me is not feasible. It weighs extra, and if my luggage gets lost they both get lost and we are back to 0 copies left.
- I have copies of copyrighted material that I’ve bought. I’m not gonna sync that to the server I rent because they might mistake it for piracy.
- My computer at home has less storage, so I can’t sync to it while traveling because there is not enough space left at home. I bought the 5 TiB HDD while traveling.
- I think it’s pretty darn silly that electronics are so unreliable, that having one HDD is not enough. It bothers me a great bit in fact.
- I’m not gonna put my files in the cloud either.
- Sync problems are a PITA to resolve.
- A lot of places that I go, internet is slow and unreliable. In many cases if I were to ZFS send a snapshot of my HDD over the internet with a couple GiB of new data it would likely lose the connection mid transfer and I’d have to retry over and over and over and I just don’t have time nor energy for that.
>- Carrying an extra HDD with me is not feasible. It weighs extra, and if my luggage gets lost they both get lost and we are back to 0 copies left.
Why are you not keeping a copy at, say, home? Even if it gets old between backups, having some data is better than complete data loss.
>- I have copies of copyrighted material that I’ve bought. I’m not gonna sync that to the server I rent because they might mistake it for piracy.
Why are you backing up to a location not under your ownership?
>- My computer at home has less storage, so I can’t sync to it while traveling because there is not enough space left at home. I bought the 5 TiB HDD while traveling.
You have monies and time to rent a server, buy a huge HDD on the road, procure gadgets, but none for basic upkeep back home?
>- I think it’s pretty darn silly that electronics are so unreliable, that having one HDD is not enough. It bothers me a great bit in fact.
The fickle nature of electronics has nothing to do with this. If something is important to you, you keep multiple copies in case one gets destroyed. Because one day, some deity in the sky is going to decide you will suffer today.
>- I’m not gonna put my files in the cloud either.
See response to backing up to a rented server.
>- Sync problems are a PITA to resolve.
There are solutions that could help you, because many people have walked that path.
>- A lot of places that I go, internet is slow and unreliable. In many cases if I were to ZFS send a snapshot of my HDD over the internet with a couple GiB of new data it would likely lose the connection mid transfer and I’d have to retry over and over and over and I just don’t have time nor energy for that.
If you accrue so much data while on the road that a proper backup scheme is impractical, you absolutely should still duplicate it on another HDD to at least reduce the risk of data loss.
Backing up is ultimately a question of whether the time lost recovering from data loss is more expensive than implementing and performing a backup scheme. It's a question of motivation, not difficulty.
In addition to the PD trigger boards, you can actually get short cables with USB-C ports on one end and barrel jacks of specific voltages. I use a 12V one for my soldering iron (love it) and have a couple 5V ones for various networking gear.
No DIP switches, no ability to change what they output, just rock-solid functionality assuming you can get the exact tip you need for your device you probly can from aliexpress).
One caveat: In my experience all these things (cable and PD boards alike) will output 5V if the charger does not support whichever voltage (5V when you want 9V, 12V, or 20V, for example). I’d much rather they put out nothing in those cases. Hopefully the next generations will.
Electric Shaver. Every single manufactures, and even across their own product line all uses a slightly different charger.
I am not even a USB-C for everything person. But if we could have 80%+ of Consumer electrics that uses less than 30W to use USB-C would be a great start.
I would pay a good chunk of money for a BIFL device that took usb-c, and had support for attacking a shaver head or toothbrush head, and had reasonably priced head replacements for both.
I've seen adds for a new Philips multi-attachment one but it doesn't say if it's USB-C or not. There's finally usb-c powered electric toothbrushes. Unfortunately they all seem to be "low powered".
I recently tested what cable/adapter charged my old iPad the fastest. I suspected cheap clone cables to be worse but from USB A, all performed the same at around 11-12 watts. The best was the macbook usb C charger at 25 watts.
Aren't all USB-C hubs with PD "powered"? Like, some output more power to other ports when fed with a power source?
For example, I have two Anker hubs, one USB-C with USB-A ports and an unpowered USB-A hub. To get enough power to use the USB-A hub for anything more than basic input devices when connected to the USB-C hub, I have to run a powered connection through the PD port on the USB-C hub.
I think OP meant products that convert 110V mains power into several high-wattage USB-PD receptacles (as opposed to the usual meaning of "USB Hub" for connecting multiple data devices to one USB host port).
Anker's best offering in this category runs for $150 and only has 3 USB-C ports (which share a combined 240W limit—good enough for most applications but still not the full PD 3.0 limit of 100W per port, and nowhere near the PD 3.1 limits).
A true "power strip" offering 5 or more high-power USB-PD Type-C ports would be nice, though it would need the equivalent of a pretty beefy PC's power supply to drive many simultaneous loads at those limits.
Why the fuck would you want more stuff powered through the most garbage connector ever made? I know the government is trying to impoverish us by requiring usb-c but you're not supposed to like it. There's even people suggesting using it for resistive heating appliances. Is the article prophetic and the government doesn't want us to have a hot plate to cook anything bigger than a thumbnail?
180 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadPrice is right though to be sure.
The lack of safety features and warnings about blowing stuff up are a bit scary though, lol.
You can, however, blow up stuff with the Power-Z, too.
[1]: https://www.chargerlab.com/introducing-the-brand-new-power-z...
USB-C power delivery cables are pretty useful and better than a dozen transformers fighting for space on a power strip.
I’ve always had a 110 soldering station, but recently bought a Pinecil portable iron for soldering in the field, and damn that thing is so convenient and fast to heat and accurate, I hardly bother with my full solder station any more
The pinecil is unbelievably good for what it costs. I find myself using it more than any other soldering iron, only pulling out bigger more expensive models when I need more thermal mass. I can’t recommend it enough.
The one downside someone pointed out is that replacement tips are pricey because they seem to include the actual heating element, but even then it’s still such a great device IMO
And, at $25 for a set of four, they aren't even that expensive.
https://pine64.com/product/pinecil-soldering-short-tip-set-f...
Brands like AiXun and Handskit make inexpensive stations that are compatible with JBC C215/C245 cartridges, which gives you a ridiculous level of performance for the price.
Also, don't sleep on knife tips. For a long time I thought that the Chinese phone repair guys were goofy for using them so much, but they were right, I was an idiot and I now use them 99% of the time.
If your product is more complex than a light bulb, dealing with mains power can be quite a hassle. It requires bigger and more expensive parts than negotiating for 20V DC with a USB PD source.
You might want to take a look at USB-C to barrel connector adapters intended to run older laptops on modern chargers. They are tiny and cheap, I use one to liberate a thunderbolt 4 hub from the massive power brick it came with.
>There don’t seem to be any powered USB-C hubs, so I went shopping on AliExpress and eventually came across this nice board:
Are they UL listed? With that kind of watts, seems like they are capable of starting a fire and burning down your home if not properly designed, manufactured, tested, etc.
I'm not sure though, if the board can actually put out high power from all 4 ports at the same time. Does anyone know?
looks fine, if it's AWG 14 then it's rated for about 32 amps
> Announced in 2021, the USB PD Revision 3.1 specification is a major update to enable delivering up to 240W of power over full featured USB Type-C® cable and connector. Prior to this update, USB PD was limited to 100W using a solution based on 20V using USB Type-C cables rated at 5A. The USB Type-C specification has also been updated to Release 2.1 to define 240W cable requirements, and with the updated USB PD protocol and power supply definition, this extends the applicability of USB power delivery to a large number of applications where 100W wasn't adequate.
* https://www.usb.org/usb-charger-pd
I do look forward to future iterations of boards like this that support usb-c input. Weird as that is. Basically a power breakout board. And heck, why not throw some usb hubs on it all too?
The key requirement for this (after the spec comes along) would be high quality high-power rated Type C cables, and safe high-power Type C outlets. No need for each appliance to have different sorts of cables (mostly irreplaceable and fixed length) which don't fit some outlets correctly.
Maybe after some regulations, it would even be easy to update the firmware of those home appliances to open source alternatives.
The new 240W spec is 5A and 50V. Assuming 5A is the thermal limit of the connector and that can't change, to get 1500W you'd need 300V, which is probably higher than the connector can support in terms of conductor spacing.
What can go wrong ?
If there is some liquid poured over the connector or if the cable is damaged, this could really become nasty.
Please, for the love of Zeus, no!
Sure, having a single standard everywhere sounds like fun, but there is such thing as physics...
Also I really don't want people to try to run electric kettles over iPhone USB charging cord.
I have a bag at home scores of AC to DC adapters and cables.
Whereas I can trivially rewire my kettle in 5 minutes to use headphone wires instead of the properly sized wires it needs, and people routinely do the equivalent of that, e.g. extending their oven, microwave or kettle's cable with the cheapest extension cord they can find.
So it would actually be significantly safer, you can make a USB-PD wire that says it accepts 100W, but actually just melts, but doing so requires significantly more moronic perseverance than doing the equivalent with an under-rated extension cord.
Most people aren't making their own cables and programming what they accept into them. They're just using whatever cables they have that works. If you were a business owner and profit was your short term motive, and you had a factory making different cables supporting different wattages, would it be easier to program the specific firmware that should be on each cable, or just program all cables so they say they "support" the max? Shortcuts like that are not theoretical - ethernet cards are supposed to be programmed with unique MAC addresses, but we've seen out in the wild, MACs be the same on batches of cards, or set to all zeros.
When it's 240W the stakes are lower than when it's 3000W.
Because someone released Ethernet cards with duplicate MAC addresses, we should conclude that a future hypothetical USB-PD spec capable of powering a kettle would be more prone to failure than the status quo of bringing your own extension cord?
Electric cords don't need to self-declare their capabilities, USB-PD cables do. So the odds of a mistake on the manufacturer side are lower, as you'd need to pair an incapable wire with the wrong E-Mark chip.
For an extension cord to melt and catch fire all you need to do is for the customer to misread a label, or more likely not read one at all.
If we're talking about the short-term motives of sociopaths, your hypothetical factory will have an even easier time labeling headphone wires as capable of carrying 16A. They don't need to fraudulently manufacture one with the wrong E-Mark chip, just slap a new sticker on the box they're shipped in.
I'm as frustrated with the confusion around USB-C as anyone, but I don't think we need to worry that the problems associated with race-to-the bottom manufacturers in the 15W space are going to extend to 100W, 240W, or hypothetical 3000W cables. The price point, serious failure modes, and potential liability will all serve as moats.
I have been vindicated many times.
Add to that what now you would need USB-PD chip in any cable, what you cannot use the cable if the chip dies, what they would go directly to the landfill.
Hell, even CAT5 ethernet cables are made of shit for decades, I personally witnessed reruns needed for the lines which were laid with a 'proper' (on the pack) cable, yet didn't work at any meaningful distance.
To increase the wattage with such tiny wires, you need to increase voltage a lot. Imagine auto-negotiating at 5kV.
If you're getting shocked by that, you've got bigger problems.
[0] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/476895/ac-to...
There are many ways in which low quality power supplies can expose up to full main power voltage on the secondary side. For example, with 230 V on Vbus and 225 V on "ground", an USB device might not even be able to tell the difference.
Only if it senses an upstream-facing port of another device will it expose 5V of Vbus, let alone 20 V (or more recently 48 V) via PD, which would require a complex handshake to prevent exactly that situation (i.e. electric shocks or arcing) from arising.
As others have already said, what you're experiencing is likely an improperly designed power supply (that can happen even with plain old USB-A battery charging and has caused deadly accidents in the past!) or static electricity.
USB-C is currently specified for 1.25 amps per pin at 48 volts. If you decide you don't need any data wires and make all 24 pins hot, with the shield as the return path, that's already 1500 watts. And I'm sure you could tweak it to get somewhat more.
Protocol and pinout incompatibility is a bad idea but it has nothing to do with physics.
Also as a sibling comment states, it's arguably not a worse violation of those things than the existing ability to change voltage.
The hypothetical was reusing the plug, not reusing existing cables.
The person you were responding to explicitly mentioned that the cables would need to be upgraded.
For example, a full-size extension cord can be soldered to a USB-C plug without much difficulty.
Whatever wire gauge you want, it can be done. The bottleneck is the pins, and there's 24 of them.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/07/blend-cap/
I've actually jokingly suggested that USB will go this way. You'll plug in your new induction cooktop with a USB cable you fished out of the junk drawer and all of the LEDs and screens will light up. However, the second you turn a zone on the cable melts and burns your house down because the cable didn't support the USB-HPD-IH 2.3 Gen2x120 spec.
seems like Ki [1] is more the way to go for appliances. just a few hotspots around the kitchen for the kettle or pot.
[1] https://www.wirelesspowerconsortium.com/standards/ki-cordles...
They can get really warm when run at full power. If the sockets are worn out they can even get hot enough to melt the plastic. A few electric car owners experienced that, when they charged their car on a regular socket. (with the higher voltage in Europe it's feasible to charge a car on a standard socket, 0-100% can take as "little" as 20 to 30 hours.)
So I highly doubt those currents could every be delivered on such a tiny and brittle connector. 240W already seems like pushing it to the limits. Higher voltages seem impossible too, there is not enough space for isolation. Small mechanical faults could easily expose those dangerous voltages to the user.
So much so that it's not allowed to provide such an "emergency charger" with a regular Schuko plug when you sell a new EV here in Norway.
I thought I had displaced mine for my new car until I called the seller and he informed me of this recent rule.
*: some devices don't have replaceable fuses.
Most electric car charges nowadays can sense overheating by a decrease in voltage (i've seen a voltage drop from 225V to 205V within a few minutes, and the charger immediately limited the current to 6A). And a lot of them also monitor the temperature of the cables and the plugs.
Now the real issues enters the game: extension cords. If the temperature issues happens on the other side of the extension cord, maybe 20-50m away the charger still measures perfectly fine temperatures on the plug. But the socket the extension cord is plugged in may be already burning.
That's why you should never ever (!) charge an electric car on a Schuko extension cord. Even if everything is in perfectly working condition and rated for 16A.
Roll-out extension leads are extra dangerous though, even if fused. I have a relative that had to jump out of a second floor window on a construction site when someone set all of their batteries charging on a wrapped up extension lead, which rapidly started a fire. I assume it happened faster than the thermal cutoff could trigger.
There are many factors that can lead to overheating. Like damaged sockets, Plugs not plugged in fully, dirty plugs/sockets, cheap/old sockets that don't fulfil the specs, wear in sockets that leads to not enough pressure on the pins and smaller contact surface, ...
https://www.cookwithki.com/
Vaporware boils water best.
Well this is very unlikely to happen.
To deliver more power, you either need to increase voltage, or increase current.
- The higher the voltage, the easier an electric arc can form between two wires. Cables and connectors are voltage rated depending on the clearance/spacing between their components. USB-C is very compact, it is unlikely it could be used for more than say 20V without starting to create arc issues.
- Increasing current means increasing wire gauge, otherwise the cables will just burn. Ultimately "beefing" USB cables will make them clunky and rigid to the point where it will defeat its purpose. The connectors would need to be bigger as well, to a point where these new high power connectors wouldn't fit regular USB-C connectors.
Not very well. It takes a shitload of energy to boil a cup of water. About 0.5MJ for 8 ounces raised from 20C to 100C. My portable battery pack holds about 100Wh of energy. That's 360,000J. So that battery pack has enough energy to boil one cup of water and not quite a second one. And that assumes 100% efficiency.
I realize that we're talking about two different things: wall outlets vs. batteries, but boiling water is hard.
1000 watts + 750 watts = 1750 watts, which is fine for 1 minute on a standard 125 V 15 outlet.
But that griddle averages 750 watts. It is actually cycling between 1500 watts and 0 watts. 1000 watts + 1500 watts = 2500 watts. That's way over the rating for the outlet.
The griddle and the microwave and the house's power controller should be able to coordinate so that when I try to use the microwave it happens when the griddle is in an off part of its cycle.
I absolutely hope such a hellish future does not come to pass.
Why?
Because USB-C ports will physically die long before any electrical wall socket design currently in use ever will. A good wall socket will serve its purpose for centuries over millions if not trillions of insertion cycles performed by the dumbest ape this side of the galaxy.
You can't get this high power rating on USB-C ever. Because physics. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/wx5ati/commen...
It'd be lovely to see a thermal imager of it under load, see how hot parts get & where. Total power is unspecified, but 65w out x 4 ports / 32V input is 8A, which may be possibly perhaps it can sustain but only maybe.
I did try to go find this part on the website that's silkscreened on to the board, http://diymore.cc , but didn't find it there.
Guess who arrived at an AirBnB a couple of days ago, tired and just wanting to get things quickly unpacked and set up. And guess who forgot which was which of the 5V and 12V powered device and plugged the 12V power cord into the 5V device.
That’s right, this guy :(
So now my RPi powered device with the 5TiB SATA HDD does not power on anymore, and for all I know plugging the 12V power supply into it may have even broken the circuit board of the HDD, in which case it will be very expensive to get my data back as HDD circuit replacement is outside of my set of skills.
I wish all of these electronic I carry just used USB-C instead.
EDIT: Oh damn, this doesn't do 5V, which is what I need the most :(
And there are definitely 5v options, like these:
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805818718384.html
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805815622101.html
That's what many simple early USB-C chargers used to do in order to supply 15W without full PD signalling.
But what would you call such a product, other than "5V PD trigger"?
https://fpx.oxplot.com/
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805068086690.html
You'd take this thing or something like it, set the DIP switches/solder bridges/jumpers appropriately, get a few 2.1x5.5 (or appropriate) barrel jack to screw terminal adapters, wrap it and a couple wires in heat shrink and hot glue it to the back of your HDD/RPi/etc, and have a USB-C plug to power your HDD adapter.
There are so many different kinds and sizes of barrel jacks that when I was trying to order one that matches a cable I had, I eventually rage quit out of exasperation when even when finally finding and ordering some that matched the specs, they didn't fit, lmao. I now power everything with XT30/60 connectors.
Don't forget to match polarity if your device requires DC and doesn't have a bridge diode. (Looking at you SNES!).
I used the wrong tip (non original) for a network switch, and even though it felt like a perfect fit and worked, it must have been a poor enough fit to start arcing. The plug was completely melted, though luckily the gear was undamaged.
I still have issues buying them from "real" distributors and manufacturers. I still can't seem to cough up an actual datasheet.
For a while, some of them had a habit of arcing and catching on fire, as well. Not a big deal when doing attended, high impact stuff like racing or robots. However, that's a BIG problem when using them for unattended power.
They are configurable to more than two poles and can be keyed by changing the orientation of the poles.
The small size ones go to 45A DC and are easily crimped and assembled.
XT60 spec: https://www.tme.eu/Document/2d152ced3b7a446066e6c419d84bb460...
XT30 spec:
- female https://www.tme.eu/Document/f2d0830114aabe6ea8d4bb128e962790...
- male https://www.tme.eu/Document/7d9d972ae3468777f69ec2ee99897652...
Source: 14 year old managed to jam the barrel jack into his laptop's HDMI port and fucked the whole device.
That's still "only" 240W, i.e. not nearly enough to charge electric bicycles. The other direction would still be nice, i.e. for faster charging of phones mounted on the handle bar.
I'd rather take my chances during the few times I need to really charge my phone in the rain over the inevitably slower charging speeds and inefficiencies that go with wireless charging, especially when the power source is also a battery.
But the big reason is it's just a big object, and using a little tiny wire and plug on a big object that can fall over is just asking for damage. There's a reason 120V plugs are the size they are, and it's not ampacity. Big connectors for big objects. Small connectors for small objects.
That being said a dual role sink -source controller on a motorized bicycle battery pack would be super convenient for charging phones on the go etc
5v, 9v, 12v, 15v, 20v - selectable with all kinds of adapters.
I had a motorized massage gun that had a 9v barrel connector, this thing worked perfectly. I can also use it to charge a 12v usb-c tablet I have that won't work with normal usb-c PD.
Raspberry Pi boards already come with USB-C; you shouldn't have chosen to downgrade that with barrel plug cases.
Yep
That's absolutely on you for not having a backup of a HDD that gets moved and tossed around and replugged constantly.
That HDD dying suddenly is an inevitability that will have happened sooner or later.
- Carrying an extra HDD with me is not feasible. It weighs extra, and if my luggage gets lost they both get lost and we are back to 0 copies left.
- I have copies of copyrighted material that I’ve bought. I’m not gonna sync that to the server I rent because they might mistake it for piracy.
- My computer at home has less storage, so I can’t sync to it while traveling because there is not enough space left at home. I bought the 5 TiB HDD while traveling.
- I think it’s pretty darn silly that electronics are so unreliable, that having one HDD is not enough. It bothers me a great bit in fact.
- I’m not gonna put my files in the cloud either.
- Sync problems are a PITA to resolve.
- A lot of places that I go, internet is slow and unreliable. In many cases if I were to ZFS send a snapshot of my HDD over the internet with a couple GiB of new data it would likely lose the connection mid transfer and I’d have to retry over and over and over and I just don’t have time nor energy for that.
So it’s not as easy as you make it out to be.
Why are you not keeping a copy at, say, home? Even if it gets old between backups, having some data is better than complete data loss.
>- I have copies of copyrighted material that I’ve bought. I’m not gonna sync that to the server I rent because they might mistake it for piracy.
Why are you backing up to a location not under your ownership?
>- My computer at home has less storage, so I can’t sync to it while traveling because there is not enough space left at home. I bought the 5 TiB HDD while traveling.
You have monies and time to rent a server, buy a huge HDD on the road, procure gadgets, but none for basic upkeep back home?
>- I think it’s pretty darn silly that electronics are so unreliable, that having one HDD is not enough. It bothers me a great bit in fact.
The fickle nature of electronics has nothing to do with this. If something is important to you, you keep multiple copies in case one gets destroyed. Because one day, some deity in the sky is going to decide you will suffer today.
>- I’m not gonna put my files in the cloud either.
See response to backing up to a rented server.
>- Sync problems are a PITA to resolve.
There are solutions that could help you, because many people have walked that path.
>- A lot of places that I go, internet is slow and unreliable. In many cases if I were to ZFS send a snapshot of my HDD over the internet with a couple GiB of new data it would likely lose the connection mid transfer and I’d have to retry over and over and over and I just don’t have time nor energy for that.
If you accrue so much data while on the road that a proper backup scheme is impractical, you absolutely should still duplicate it on another HDD to at least reduce the risk of data loss.
Backing up is ultimately a question of whether the time lost recovering from data loss is more expensive than implementing and performing a backup scheme. It's a question of motivation, not difficulty.
No DIP switches, no ability to change what they output, just rock-solid functionality assuming you can get the exact tip you need for your device you probly can from aliexpress).
One caveat: In my experience all these things (cable and PD boards alike) will output 5V if the charger does not support whichever voltage (5V when you want 9V, 12V, or 20V, for example). I’d much rather they put out nothing in those cases. Hopefully the next generations will.
>This part of community is for Early Access Users
I am not even a USB-C for everything person. But if we could have 80%+ of Consumer electrics that uses less than 30W to use USB-C would be a great start.
I recently tested what cable/adapter charged my old iPad the fastest. I suspected cheap clone cables to be worse but from USB A, all performed the same at around 11-12 watts. The best was the macbook usb C charger at 25 watts.
Aren't all USB-C hubs with PD "powered"? Like, some output more power to other ports when fed with a power source?
For example, I have two Anker hubs, one USB-C with USB-A ports and an unpowered USB-A hub. To get enough power to use the USB-A hub for anything more than basic input devices when connected to the USB-C hub, I have to run a powered connection through the PD port on the USB-C hub.
Anker's best offering in this category runs for $150 and only has 3 USB-C ports (which share a combined 240W limit—good enough for most applications but still not the full PD 3.0 limit of 100W per port, and nowhere near the PD 3.1 limits).
A true "power strip" offering 5 or more high-power USB-PD Type-C ports would be nice, though it would need the equivalent of a pretty beefy PC's power supply to drive many simultaneous loads at those limits.