I've basically stopped buying any portable electronics unless they take USB-C.
Currently travelling with a laptop, watch, toothbrush, eReader, camera, bug-bite treater, and phone - all charging from the same power brick.
I'm guaranteed of getting a replacement cable / charger wherever I am in the world if I need it.
The only slight snag is some cheaper itema refuse to use PD and insist on plain 5V/2A - buy most decent travel chargers have NON-PD ports.
Amusingly, most of the buses I've taken recently also have USB-C ports on them for ad hoc charging. Perhaps one day EVs will use USB-PD-Max rather than CCS :-)
I've also returned a few USB devices that ship with a USB-A to USB-C cable and ONLY charge in that mode, they also MUST charge with USB-C PD.
The two so far were a therapy light and some Zippo hand warmers. Like, who in the hell would design a device that has a USB-C port on it where only a fraction of chargers will work on it. It feels even worse than proprietary charges, because you see a USB-C port on it and think, oh I have a plug that fits it, and then it doesn't F**ing work. Idiot engineering/product teams, making the world suck with their falsely advertised USB-C ports. If anyone of you are on a team that ever makes this decision, just know that it is a stupid decision, and jump ship when you can.
I think you are confusing the devices with USB-C that require USB-A, and devices that charge the standard USB-C 5V/3A/15W. The USB-A ones cheaped out in including the resistors that signal legacy USB mode, they work with the ones in the cable or adapter.
Lots of people assume that USB-C always uses USB-PD, but the basic signalling is done with resistors. Lots of devices only need 15W, and it is better than USB-A charging. If you want faster charging, buy more powerful chargers.
For travel I have a bunch of cables with adapters on the end (choose usb-c, lightning, micro-usb). Can use usb-c, but have the ability to use the others.
It has helped out in a bunch of unexpected situations (usually someone else's device)
I'm hoping we'll see most e-bikes at least use 240W usb-c pd charging (I figure I have about a decade until I will wish I had some assist and buy one, so probably by then, they'll have gotten there...)
I also have assorted products that won't charge c-to-c (some from respectable manufacturers even, like Philips), but I see you can get little adapters with 5.1K resistor you plug into said crappy devices to cover that, I will have to try some out.
What toothbrush do you have? I've been looking for a USB-C charger for mine (standard Oral-B toothbrush) but the only ones I've found were from no-name Chinese brands and didn't work at all.
we are talking about a lightweight charging cable. you can carry more than one. boom, redundancy. being ideological about a cable connector is the nerdy equivalent of jony ive obsessing over macbook thinness.
> The only slight snag is some cheaper itema refuse to use PD and insist on plain 5V/2A - buy most decent travel chargers have NON-PD ports.
Every PD port will handle non-PD USB-C consumers correctly, so not sure why would you care about non-PD ports. There is no "plain 5V/2A" in USB-C though, it's either plain USB (100/150/500/900mA depending on enumeration state), 1.5A or 3A. If you want to advertise exactly 5V/2A, you need PD.
> Amusingly, most of the buses I've taken recently also have USB-C ports on them for ad hoc charging.
I've been pleasantly surprised recently when I plugged in my OnePlus into the bus in a medium/small Belgian city and saw the supervooc animation. (And it was actually fast charging, a 8 minute ride gave about 15% battery.)
For anyone wondering about technical details, PPS chargers now show up as supervooc apparently.
I'm looking forward to USB-C PD small format factor PC's. A decent amount of room in the PC cases is taken up by the power supply. And if USB-C could somehow provide a range of voltages to the motherboard, SFFPC's could be downsized even more
Speaking of which, does anyone know a line of PD Decoy modules to convert barrel jacks to USB-C without the atrocious behavior of "oh, the charger doesn't have 12V, here's 9V have fun!" that the early ones all did? Ideally I'd like a little red light to come on or something, but I'd settle for not silently browning out the device.
Don’t think you’ll find it cause it’s not an issue with the decoy - that’s the expected behaviour. 12v isn’t mandatory. Which is insane but here we are.
On the plus side some of the bottom tier anker chargers will do 12v.
Does PD include a specification that allows a client device to share its current battery level? How does Apriv know which device “needs” a high output level?
> Using dual-port modules, the system recognizes that, say, one smartphone battery in the vehicle is at 5 percent of capacity and a second phone is at 75 percent. The programming module gives the former device 100W and the latter 25W.
I'm appreciating this recent spate of "Why Underappreciated Technology X is Good" articles. (For example, the recent EXIF one.) It's way too easy focus on the bad and foment outrage. But the world we inhabit is pretty good, and it's good to understand why it's pretty good.
IMHO this is a classic example of extreme overcomplexity leading to fragility and regulatory capture along with increased opportunities for antiuser hostility. Practically all devices needed nothing more than +/- on a robust barrel jack, but now we have negotiable voltage (with disasterous consequences if there is a bug in the inherently software-driven process --- which will certainly happen) pushing insane amounts of current through a tiny effete connector with barely-visible pins, "authentication" schemes to enforce vendor lock-in under the guise of protection, and entire regions legally mandating this flustercuck.
security-wise, usb-c is the worst scenario device I've ever seen -- unless you're Apple, you can't make a security-boundary without infringing patent US11205021B2
for laptops, a bad-actor usb-c cable/charger can do so much more, unless your laptop has AI that can distinguish "is this signal really coming from monitor/keyboard/etc ?"
I'd rather have plain-old DC adapters (or usbc to dc)
I have found this ST Discovery kit extremely useful in figuring out what my USB-C power sources could actually supply.
"The STM32G071B-DISCO Discovery board is a demonstration and development platform for the STMicroelectronics Arm® Cortex®-M0+ core-based STM32G071RB microcontroller and particularly the USB Type-C™ and Power Delivery controllers.
...
The STM32G071B-DISCO Discovery board discovers and displays USB Type-C™ port capabilities such as data role, power role, VBUS and IBUS monitoring. ..."
Madness. USB C doesn't even let you control which way the power goes. Try to charge your phone by plugging in a USBC power bank? Oops, the phone is charging the power bank instead of the other way around. Sometimes you can't even make that stop without a USB-A cable. I can't imagine what kind of fools invented that.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 33.0 ms ] threadCurrently travelling with a laptop, watch, toothbrush, eReader, camera, bug-bite treater, and phone - all charging from the same power brick.
I'm guaranteed of getting a replacement cable / charger wherever I am in the world if I need it.
The only slight snag is some cheaper itema refuse to use PD and insist on plain 5V/2A - buy most decent travel chargers have NON-PD ports.
Amusingly, most of the buses I've taken recently also have USB-C ports on them for ad hoc charging. Perhaps one day EVs will use USB-PD-Max rather than CCS :-)
I've also returned a few USB devices that ship with a USB-A to USB-C cable and ONLY charge in that mode, they also MUST charge with USB-C PD.
The two so far were a therapy light and some Zippo hand warmers. Like, who in the hell would design a device that has a USB-C port on it where only a fraction of chargers will work on it. It feels even worse than proprietary charges, because you see a USB-C port on it and think, oh I have a plug that fits it, and then it doesn't F**ing work. Idiot engineering/product teams, making the world suck with their falsely advertised USB-C ports. If anyone of you are on a team that ever makes this decision, just know that it is a stupid decision, and jump ship when you can.
Lots of people assume that USB-C always uses USB-PD, but the basic signalling is done with resistors. Lots of devices only need 15W, and it is better than USB-A charging. If you want faster charging, buy more powerful chargers.
It has helped out in a bunch of unexpected situations (usually someone else's device)
I also have assorted products that won't charge c-to-c (some from respectable manufacturers even, like Philips), but I see you can get little adapters with 5.1K resistor you plug into said crappy devices to cover that, I will have to try some out.
Every PD port will handle non-PD USB-C consumers correctly, so not sure why would you care about non-PD ports. There is no "plain 5V/2A" in USB-C though, it's either plain USB (100/150/500/900mA depending on enumeration state), 1.5A or 3A. If you want to advertise exactly 5V/2A, you need PD.
I've been pleasantly surprised recently when I plugged in my OnePlus into the bus in a medium/small Belgian city and saw the supervooc animation. (And it was actually fast charging, a 8 minute ride gave about 15% battery.)
For anyone wondering about technical details, PPS chargers now show up as supervooc apparently.
On the plus side some of the bottom tier anker chargers will do 12v.
Plus I think the very new PPS ones should too
> Using dual-port modules, the system recognizes that, say, one smartphone battery in the vehicle is at 5 percent of capacity and a second phone is at 75 percent. The programming module gives the former device 100W and the latter 25W.
for laptops, a bad-actor usb-c cable/charger can do so much more, unless your laptop has AI that can distinguish "is this signal really coming from monitor/keyboard/etc ?" I'd rather have plain-old DC adapters (or usbc to dc)
"The STM32G071B-DISCO Discovery board is a demonstration and development platform for the STMicroelectronics Arm® Cortex®-M0+ core-based STM32G071RB microcontroller and particularly the USB Type-C™ and Power Delivery controllers.
...
The STM32G071B-DISCO Discovery board discovers and displays USB Type-C™ port capabilities such as data role, power role, VBUS and IBUS monitoring. ..."
https://www.st.com/resource/en/user_manual/dm00496511-stm32g...
Around ~$70 US now. Was around $50 when I bought mine a couple of years ago.
STM32G071B-DISCO at Mouser or Digikey.