I need more USB power
atomic14.substack.com
atomic14.substack.com
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:
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"?
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.
> 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.
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.
> Also I really don't want people to try to run electric
> kettles over iPhone USB charging cord.
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.
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, ...
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.
> USB-C is very compact, it is unlikely
> it could be used for more than say 20V without
> starting to create arc issues.
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.
>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.
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.
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
Price is right though to be sure.
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.
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.
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...