Submitted 9 months ago by lgsp@feddit.it to technology@lemmy.world
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/15/usb-c-pd-new-technology-done-right/
I wanted to share this opinion on Hackaday about a topic that is the usefulness of a something that has become ubiquitous relatively fast.
This techonolgyy has a lot of potential, what do you think?
Some AI written post’s language really sucks, and this is one of them.
I honestly don’t know how to take this 🤔
It’s very difficult to quote Douglas Adams without sounding like you’re pandering to nerd culture. I don’t AI could pull it off.
I don’t what to think of someone who could blast off accusations like this, either.
Just your normal redditor who didn’t create anything trying to feel superior by dismissing someone else’s effort. Don’t overthink it.
Thank you. Also I could have written it better. Reading what I wrote again I wasn’t happy at all. It really sounded a bit fake…
AI can spell technology.
Also the de-jure standard in the EU
TIL de jure. At first I thought this was a typo of du jour.
de jure /dĭ joo͝r′ē, dā yoo͝r′ā/ adverb & adjective According to law; by right. noun By right; according to law. See de facto. adjective By right, in accordance with the law, legally.
I wish PoE would get more love. Networking and power in one package. Voltage is high enough that you can run it around your house without too much power loss, but not so high that you are supposed to have a licensed electrician do it. The equipment for it is getting cheaper. It’s easily powerful enough to run smart LED lights without wireless network nonsense. Plus, you can give your PoE switch its own dedicated UPS, and now your lights are all on battery backup.
It was born for a corporate IT environment for running VoIP phones and security cameras, and mostly ignored for residential customers.
I love PoE, but there are some hard limitations to that idea. Mainly cost per meter of cable, but also in the amount of runs that would need to be completed to accomplish that. I cant splice two ethernet cables together and run one to a nearby light or other device without a switch, which means more equipment or more cable to make it work. Also, being 48v, it will have a lower overall efficiency compared to direct wiring with 110-220v, especially with the higher resistance of ethernet vs 14ga romex. That being said, I’d love to see 48v dc in home outlets.
310m poe cat5 won’t be more as sixty bucks will it?
If we’re talking about hiring someone to run AC wires, then the cost of extra equipment can be offset by the labor costs.
(I have definitely hired a master electrician for every outlet added to my house. Definitely.)
Oh boy do I have something for you. The single pair ethernet standards. Connect 8 devices on the same line as a bus.
PoE is terrible. I threw mine away and went back to 802.11ac wireless and it was 10x faster. The problem is the circuit breakers, washing machines, or anything that generates EMI screw with the quality. Ethernet>wifi>PoE, at least for most use cases.
I think you are confusing PoE (Power over Ethernet) with EoP (Ethernet over Power).
PoE: is an ethernet technology that uses the ethernet cabling to power small devices like APs, phones, cameras, etc. while providing an ethernet connection.
EoP: is using a pair (or more) of devices that plug into power outlets which you then connect ethernet cables to. This “extends” the ethernet cabling over the power cables in your house.
Are you talking about the adapters that let you run network through your electrical circuits? Because that’s different from PoE. PoE is running power through the network cables so you get power and network with one plug, so kind of the opposite of that.
I can confirm that using electrical infrastructure for network is really not great.
I generally like USB-PD, as you can generally plug in any PD compliant device into any PD compliant charger and it will charge. The connector doesn’t even matter, PD works over Lightning and for example MagSafe as well.
What I found to be lacking are these multi-port charging bricks. They do a solid job at charging battery-powered devices, but most of them renegotiate the power contract with every connected device when you plug another one in or remove one. I tried multiple chargers by Anker, Ugreen and Belkin and they all do that. Apparently Apple’s dual 35 watts USB-C charger doesn’t, but manages to renegotiate without a momentary disconnect. It’s only 35 watts though, so it’s not practical for many use cases.
Is there any disadvantage to this renegotiation? As far as I know, it happens to make sure the charging block doesnt burn your house down.
The biggest problem is that devices that aren’t battery powered will reboot.
Ideally you would have each port on its own isolated bus.
USB-PD can be used for more than just charging. If you’re running something (a headphone amp for example) from one port of a multi-port brick, you don’t want it to stop momentarily every time you plug or unplug one of the other ports.
Yes, if the device isn’t battery powered. Think one-board computers or also docks (for example Steam Deck Dock). The Deck doesn’t turn off, but the dock switches to being powered by the Steam Deck momentarily, which resets its ports as well (display and network disconnects briefly).
Maybe the Pine-power would work for you?
I believe that’s because the power needs to be shared between the ports. They normally have a maximum combined output that gets split between devices based on what charging speed they support.
Yes, but apparently you can renegotiate without briefly disconnecting, as that’s what the Apple charger apparently does. Not sure how this works on a technical level, but all multiport chargers should do that. Most don’t.
I carry around a two port 110w GaN charger for the laptops. Fast charges everything else.
I’ve modified a few devices to charge or be powered with USB C. I’ve also modified devices with USB C That didn’t work correctly because they were missing the pull down resistors on the CC lines.
Let’s not talk about the new Raspberry Pi…
Plus the Pi Pico is micro USB. I hate them for making that choice.
why not?
It doesn’t support PD, and uses an improperly wired USB-C connector.
yea, i really rolled my eyes when i saw it was 5v at 5 amps. Seriouly, give us a more sane connection!
The power situation on RPi has been shit since at least the 3B. I have plenty of powerful enough brand name USB power adapters that give low voltage warnings but work perfectly fine if you ignore it. It is way too sensitive.
I have a love/hate relationship with USB. The form factor of USB-C is fine, that’d be great to standardize it, but mechanically I prefer Apple’s lightning connector.
After multiple projects I’ve worked on that involved wiring up devices to use USB in ways other than the creator of USB intended, USB can fuck right off. I watched a video on how to properly wire up a shielded cable and the guy said that the creator of USB had no idea of how electricity flows through devices and now I agree.
I think the entire design was based on working around Apple’s patents.
Citation please? Apple was part of the USB-C Specification Working Group. Despite their obsession with the Lightning connector, they were also the ones who made USB-C-only laptops.
Seriously?! God damnit. Fuck Apple.
What hurray? USB-C and PD are both monstrosities (though of course the mini and micro USB connectors were even worse). We already had a perfectly good low power standard, regular 5 volt USB. It’s just that higher power was wanted. But we have that already too, automotive 12 volt DC, and various options after that. It’s just the mobile phone industry’s obsession with thin, tiny connectors that are causing this.
We wanted our stuff to charge faster. We can't pull more amps through the already thin wires without turning them into detonation cord, so we increase the voltage instead, and due to Ohm's Law, we get more wattage out of it as a result, so now we can charge your phone in 20 minutes instead of 3 hours.
Yes, you have 5 V. THen you have outomotive 12 V. But now you would have also automotive 48 V. USB-PD is one standard and can deal with different level of power requirements, from headsets up to laptops. And then you can use for other things as well, in a way that can be more practical than dealing with 110-220 V AC.
Is it a monstruosity? I don’t know honestly. I trust hackaday in that sense, and they usually praise it, without any hidden reason, I think.
Also, if you read the article, you can see that it is also a continuation of one from a few years back, before USB_PD was widespread. It touches also the points that you wrote. Give it a read:
I wouldn’t say usbvpd is one standard. There is a combinatorial explosion of devices and cables with different voltage support, current capacity, presence or absence of E-mark and of Thunderbird, the famous incident where a bad cable blew up Benson Huang’s laptop, etc. If you intersect down to the universal standard in the middle, it’s just plain 5 volts like before.
And are really going to push 240W through that teeny connector and not have any melt?
And you have to pay like 5K to USB-IF to build your own implementation. Because everybody forgets that USB is proprietary.
But the madness of every vendor having it own proprietary conector is worse.
USB-C and USB PD may not be good enough, but the are in the good direction.
The whole USB-PD standard is massively over complicated and that makes it a lot harder to implement in home made equipment. You pretty much need a dedicated chip just to negotiate with the power supply. The whole protocol should have been made simple enough to implement on any 8 bit microcontroller and not be locked behind a proprietary standard.
There does need to be some way to negotiate higher voltages. There is just too much voltage drop when you need more than a couple amps at 5 volts.
It would be nice to have a standard for supplying unregulated 48V DC at 1KW or more without any negotiation or electronics required and with a robust connector that won’t break if it gets bumped. That would be very useful for off grid solar systems since the power would come directly from the batteries.
I thought solar panels used Anderson connectors pretty standardly. I wouldn’t call it low power but in electronics I wouldn’t call 100W low power either. We basically need 5v 15w for phones, 12v for bigger stuff (laptops) up to say 150W. After that, AC might be better since you can use transformers. I guess we need super high power DC for charging cars. Tesla seems to be the de facto standard. There is no reason to use that connector in a phone.
When will people learn to check for potential unsavory foreign language homophones before naming their products or technology?
“PD” in French (pronounced pédé) is a short form of the word for pedophile, and also a common derogatory term for homosexuals.
There are thousands of languages. This is a silly concern
You might wanna look up why the Mitsubishi Pajero is sold as “Montero” in Spanish speaking countries.
Doesn’t the Institute Francais invent french words for new terms anyways? So isn’t it called something like “BUS DP” or something like that in french anyways? /hj
I hope there will be a more robust connector option some day. But this situation already beats most of the alternatives and especially the tangled mess of incompatible cables and power supplies.
And with a bit of smarts, it can work on two directions, charging one device off the battery of another.
For mobile phones it’s a good standard, but mfgs are putting them on desktop computers and laptop power plugs as primary power. That’s just dumb, these things are all going to fail in 10 years of regular use where USB-A could easily hold up mechanically for 50. But it’s suppose to be a data connector only. Combining things only makes devices less repairable. Broken USB-C jack? Well, better toss the laptop.
USB-A is only rated for 1,500 makt, isng cycles, whereas USB-C is supposed to last for 10,000… Though in reality the ports on my phones seem to start getting too loose to hold the jack in at around 1,000 cycles. Still, it’s not a totally unreasonable standard, and any device that hasn’t been designed to be thrown away should have ports broken out onto replaceable subassemblies – as is the case with many business-class laptops, for instance – so replacing a failed USB-PD port shouldn’t be too much trouble.
For phones I’ve found the issue is lint/dust getting in the port and clearing that out makes the port work like new again.
I’ve never seen a spare barrel jack on a laptop but a lot of laptops allow charging on multiple USBc ports. For full fat desktops though it’s basically a non starter. I think it’ll really shine when it comes to small electronics like moderns/routers, clock radios, electric toothbrushes, children’s toys, and other little things that come with barrel jacks.
It was until Raspberry Pi fucked it up with 5V5A.
I had to order a charger from another country since the model for our country has been out of stock for months.
aard@kyu.de 9 months ago
I’m in my 40s and therefore generally in the “get off my lawn, kids” age.
But I totally agree with that article. I’ve converted quite a few legacy devices with barrel jack to USB-C - and got rid of a huge box of junky old power bricks. Especially for devices I only use occasionally I don’t want to search for the matching power bricks - I just want to plug it into one of the 4 USB-C PD sockets I have installed into my desk.
bassomitron@lemmy.world 9 months ago
How difficult is it to retrofit that into older devices? Because I’d love to get rid of my.“Miscellaneous Power Cords/Adapters” box on my storage shelf.
czardestructo@lemmy.world 9 months ago
If you can solder and heat shrink then search for “usb c trigger board” on ebay and get some for like $5. They will request either 5v, 9v, 12v, 15v or 20v. I’ve found for most older battery powered barrel jack devices a voltage that is an little under spec works just fine. Ive convertered everything in my house and now own a nice USB PD battery bank, life is good.
aard@kyu.de 9 months ago
It mainly depends on the space available in the case of whatever you want to convert. If there’s a lot of space you just get a larger USB-C PD converter board with nice soldering points for the cables. The less space available the smaller the module you need to get, up to worst case trying to do your own.
xor@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
pretty easy, if soldering is easy:
(first result from amazon, not endorsement: www.amazon.com/…/B08LDJBN8P)
M500@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
What are some of these devices?
aard@kyu.de 9 months ago
Older notebooks, battery chargers, PMR radios, pretty much everything taking less than 100W DC current.
ShadowRam@kbin.social 9 months ago
Meh. I hate it.
I think society should be moving towards buildings having a dedicated DC source.
International Standardize on a DC wall plug.
Each device can step it down easily/efficiently with little electronics to their own needs.
aard@kyu.de 9 months ago
That’s pretty much the “we should all put PoE everywhere” debate, and I don’t think that’ll happen (or is a good idea) - and that’s coming from me as someone with switches providing 1.5kW of PoE power budget in the garage.
The alternative would be a shared conductor like we have now - and while that is working will in data centres doing a conductor in the required dimensions for that would be too big, and potentially dangerous, so that’ll happen even less.
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 9 months ago
We did. It’s called USB-C and my house has outlets with AC/USB-C combo.
You want another standard?
frezik@midwest.social 9 months ago
The problem is that nothing wants the same DC voltage. It wants 3.3V, or 5V, or 12V, or 48V, or 18.7V, or whatever. You end up with layers of conversion and save nothing in the end.
Let’s say you start with solar photovoltaic panels, a DC source. It feeds into a DC-DC inverter that puts out a steady 48V. Existing DC-AC microinverters can get 95% efficiency, and DC-DC conversion can be around the same.
In an AC system, we convert to DC at point of use (be it through a wall wort, a floor wort, a USB power port integrated into traditional AC plugs, or something else). This conversion can likewise be around 95% efficient.
In a DC system, we still have to do a DC-DC conversion to get the voltage you actually want at point of use. This is around 95% efficient, as well.
In the end, we stack the same number of conversions at around 95% efficiency no matter if we run AC or DC. Except that assumes we’re coming from a DC source in the first place, like solar photovoltaic. If we come from an AC source, like wind or hydro or pretty much anything besides a solar panel, then we only have transformer losses of converting the higher line AC voltage to what your house uses. Those aren’t 95% efficient; they’re closer to 98% efficient, so we’re better off.
So DC home power sounds like a good idea until you break down how conversion efficiency hits things in practice. If we’re just going to get to the same place, why bother ripping out our current system?
That said, I would like to see PoE get used for residential more. There’s lots of devices that can run off 48V and can also use networking (like smart LED lights). Why not put it over the same plug and skip having to put those devices on a wireless network? Also, you don’t need a licensed electrician to run it. You can’t be an idiot about how to run and terminate it, but you don’t need a license. This would likely be alongside our existing AC wiring, though.
Bell@lemmy.world 9 months ago
AC steps up or down easily and efficiently, DC not so much.
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 9 months ago
Wasn’t that a recommendation for LED 10 years ago already?