Hacker News Reader

Comment by photojosh | Hacker News Reader

Older devices! And some new ones that still have USB-micro.

It's quite difficult to buy a USB-C cable that is not USB-C or Lightning on the other end. While USB-A on the charger's side with USB-C on device side is quite common and comes with a lot of devices that don't include a charger.

I couldn't find USB-C to USB-micro device cables at any retail store near me.

Ended up getting them off Amazon.

My transition to all USB-C is also much slower than it could be, since you can't get 6- or 10-port chargers that are all USB-C. iirc best I've seen is 2x USB-C and then 4 USB-A.

Use cases:

- my embedded dev boards are all USB-micro (sometimes 2x of) and worse, USB-mini or USB-B. setup for dev on the go from my MBP now is a foot-long USB-C to USB-micro.

- charging older Kindles, bike lights, etc

View on HN

There are super cheap usb-a to usb-c-female adapters, tiny little cable-less adapters. I heartily recommend buying in quantity, so your existing charging gear can all expose usb-c.

Then I buy usb-c to usb-c cables. And a usbc-to-usb-micro adapter, which comes with a little chain that clips on to the cable. I use less and less micro (the majority of my recent dev boards have been usbc for example) but having a cable good for both is super convenient & easy.

I'd be careful with these: USB-A male to USB-C female adapters are illegal in the specification because they let you connect two power sources together, which can lead to explosions.

I'm pretty sure you can easily do that with a presumably legal USB-A male to USB-C male cable.

Plug one end into a charger with a USB-A port (very common among phone chargers) and the other end into a charger with a USB-C port (Apple's chargers seem to be like this?).

> Plug one end into a charger with a USB-A port (very common among phone chargers) and the other end into a charger with a USB-C port (Apple's chargers seem to be like this?).

It's forbidden to make a charger like that unless it has a chip that actually speaks the protocol and does power negotiation properly. Same for anything that has a female USB-C port.

The trick is that USB-C has a pair of pins that identify what type of cable is connected. Different value resistors on the pins identify different types of cables, so the USB-C charger will know that the cable plugged into it is a legacy A to C cable, and not actually connect its VBUS.

I got a device in the past 2 years that uses mini USB

Reply on news.ycombinator.com