Or it’s just a very cheap item. I recently bought a rechargeable disposal cannabis vape while out of town for work, I asked the dude for the cheapest dispo they had, bought it and it had a fucking micro USB on it.

Some homeless guys problem though not mine, I probably only used 50mg of the 1g cart and didn’t have to recharge it, so gave it to some homeless dude before I left.

I’ve been charging my phones exclusively wirelessly (not counting plugging in cars or emergencies) for about 15 years. From Lumia, to OnePlus to Pixel now. Zero issues.

Even iphones finally invented wireless charging a few years ago and it works very well.

I realize it’s not as efficient, but I charge overnight and we’re probably talking about $10/year in losses.

“Introducing! The internet!”

It was extremely easy to determine if a cable carried data. If there were four wires/metal strips at the end it had data. If it was only the two fat ones it was power only.

Yeah. It was already happening circa USB3. It’s not because of the connectors, but the broadening spectrum of requirements of client devices.

Maybe USB-C was a missed opportunity to address it, but it certainly didn’t “start the fire”.

It wasn’t better, but it was readable. I don’t want to go back, I want them to fix what we have now to be readable.

that means I try to charge something that either takes forever or never charges.

That’s a pretty significant failure IMO.

I don’t want to go back, but I want shit be labeled and work. You go to bed and wake up to a 7yo on a trip with a dead device, you’re going to have a bad day.

I’ve had exacrly 5x more failures of USB C ports than I’ve had of micro that is 5, and 1), and I’ve had way more micro devices over a much longer period (and still have some). It may technically be a “better” port, but my experience doesn’t reflect that.

I have to label cables and chargers because some C devices today still don’t support all charging specs, so I have to verify a device charges on a charger to know for sure.

At what point shouldn’t a device be able to negotiate down to the lowest charge capability, instead of not charge at all? That the spec permits this to happen is a major failure.

It’s fantastic that C is the convergence standard, but let’s not act like it’s close to perfect. I have to verify with every device I use if the charger actually works for it, and not just “is the charger powerful enough”, but “does it actually charge even though I know it should because it supports all the capabilities as the device”.

I saw that one back in the day. Never seen any of it in the wild yet.

Would be nice to get TB/DP on there too.

https://caberqu.com/home/20-43-c2c-caberqu-746052578813.html#/27-with_or_without_case-with_case It’s not awful for price but there are more complete testers like treedix: https://treedix.com/

What bothers me is all these testers assume you are a USB hardware wizard and know which pin combo supports which USB standard.

I want something that tells you how fast and how much power the wire can handle.

The newer cables have chips to talk to chargers to not exceed the power ratings. Why can’t these chips or testers also tell you how fast the wire can handle?

Would have been nice for some kind of forethought on a labeling system.

But there’s so many combinations now of power, data, audio, and video, and sup glasses of thunderbolt, display port, HDMI. Even if you put a 4-digit code on every cable listing exactly what they support people would never be able to understand and track down backward compatibility.

I’d be surprised in the next port change if we don’t end up with some fiber optic in there.

Well, that covers my phone, but then 45 watts won’t run my laptop, and if I plug in my phone and my laptop, they only get 22 watts each.

Then the cable: Can it be used for data transmission? What speeds does it cover? Will it transmit data through a DisplayPort or HDMI? If I unplug it from the power and plug it into the USB-C on my monitor, will I get video?

There are so many features, and it’s not like you can just go ohh I’ll get this USB-4_g cable and know what it does. Even the webpage for the Rundhult has no mention of what features are supported other than 100w.

The whole spec is complicated AF. You could spend $100 on a brick/cable that can do either 100W or high speed, but if you only need part of the equation, you can spend $30 on a brick and cable. What they support is almost never enumerated, even on the packaging.

They did have one heavily English speaking country, but those guys peaced out a few years back. Now it’s just Ireland and Malta (where English is an official language).

I think the Netherlands has the highest amount of L2 English speakers.

In the Netherlands, the English language can be spoken by the vast majority of the population, with estimates of English proficiency reaching 90%[1] to 97%[2] of the Dutch population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language_in_the_Netherlands

It’s not the official language though so all documents and legal stuff would be in Dutch.

I’m moving to Sweden soon, just about everyone there speaks English! And also Swedish is such a a pretty language I’m really excited to be immersed in it

Any Scandinavian country should have a population ranging from proficient to fluent in English.

Ireland speaks mostly English as far as I know.

Ireland, but housing is shite right now.

What a fantastic reference

https://m.xkcd.com/927/

There are now sixteen competing standards.

No way, it’s a MASSIVE pile of standards.

Pretty sure it was a reference to this problem specifically:

Even USB-C is a nightmare. There’s 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2, which were rebranded as “3.2 Gen X” with some stupid stuff there as far as what speed it supports.

Then it can do DisplayPort as well. There used to be an HDMI alt mode too!

An Intel computer might have Thunderbolt over the same cable, and can send PCIe signals over the cable to plug in a graphics card or other devices.

Then there’s USB 4 which works like Thunderbolt but isn’t restricted to Intel devices.

Then there’s the extended power profile which lets you push 240 W through a USB C port.

For a while, the USB-C connector was on graphics cards as Virtualink, which was supposed to be a one-cable standardized solution to plugging in VR headsets. Except that no headsets used it.

Then there’s Nintendo. The Switch has a Type-C port, but does its own stupid thing for video, so it can’t work with a normal dock because it’s a freak.

So you pick up a random USB C cable and have no information on what it may be capable of, plug it into a port where you again don’t know the capabilities. Its speed may be anywhere between 1.5 MBit/s (USB 1.0 low speed) and 80 GBit/s (USB 4 2.0) and it may provide between 5 and 240 W of power.

Every charger has a different power output, and sometimes it leads to a stupid situation like the Dell 130 W laptop charger. In theory, 130 W is way more than what most phones will charge at. But it only offers that at I think 20 V, which my phone can’t take. So in practice, your phone will charge at the base 5W over it.

Dell also has a laptop dock for one of their laptops that uses TWO Type-C ports, for more gooderness or something, I don’t know. Meaning it will only fit that laptop with ports exactly that far apart.

The USB chaos does lead to fun discoveries, such as when I plugged a Chromecast with Google TV’s power port into a laptop dock and discovered that it actually supports USB inputs, which is cool.

And Logitech still can’t make a USB-C dongle for their mouse.

At least it’s not a bunch of proprietary barrel chargers. My parents have a whole box of orphaned chargers with oddly specific voltages from random devices.

Umm, that is my point. Due to the massive pile of “standards” there really is not one standard in any part of the industry as it will change within months etc.

Funnily enough, USB c can also do that.

Let’s not skip Mini USB-C along the way

In all seriousness, this would make the most sense in terms of progression in design. It already sorta’ is just that, but it’s been stepped on.

Hah! Just hit me, if I’d seen a USB-C plug back in the day, my first thought would’ve been “oof, someone isn’t playing bootleg cartridge games for a while!”

It would be hilarious if they made it exactly like a headphone jack, but the USB-D slot wouldn’t support headphones.

Pin pitch is pin size and/or spacing. With physical plugs, you start to hit limitations with how small the wires can get while still being durable enough to withstand plugging/unplugging hundreds of times.

Drop losses. (I am keeping this at an ELI5 [more like ELI15, TBH] level and ignore some important stuff) Every electronic component generates heat from the power it uses. More power used usually means more heat. Heat requires physical space and lots of material to dissipate correctly. Depending on the materials used to “sink” (move; direct; channel) heat, you may need a significant amount of material to dissipate the heat correctly. So, you can use more efficient materials to reduce the amount of power that is converted to heat or improve how heat is transferred away from the component. (If you are starting to sense that there is a heat/power feedback loop here, it’s because there can be.) Since a bit of power is converted to heat, you can increase the power to your device to compensate but this, in turn, generates more heat that must be dissipated.

In short, if your device runs on 9v and draws a ton of power, you need to calculate how much of that power is going to be wasted as heat. You can Google Ohms Law if you would like, but you can usually measure a “voltage drop” across any component. A resistor, which resists electrical current, will “drop” voltage in a circuit because some of the current (measured in amperage) is converted to heat.

I kinda smashed a few things together related to efficiency and thermodynamics in a couple of paragraphs, but I think I coved the basics. (I cropped a ton of stuff about ohms law and why that is important, as well as how/where heat is important enough to worry about. Long story short: heat bad)

Pin pitch is ultimately the spacing between traces. The traces are not as big of an issue as the actual spaces between the traces. This clearance is where things get tricky with making printed circuit boards. The process of masking off some circuit is not that hard. The way the stuff you want to keep is isolated from the copper you want to remove is the hard part. One of the issues is that you need an acid to take away the copper, but not the mask, but copper has a thickness. As the copper is etched away the acid moves sideways into the thickness too. Copper never etches completely uniformly either. The larger areas of open copper that need to be removed will etch much faster than a bunch of thinly spaced gaps. One of the tricks to design is finding ways to etch consistently with the process you build.

If you want to make super tiny traces that still have the right amount of copper and have all the gaps etched away consistently, the process of the etching toolchain becomes more expensive. You will need a stronger acid with a very good way of removing the etchant that is close to the copper and loaded with copper already. This is usually done with a stream of small bubbles, but it is risky because it could impact the adhesion of the masking material over the traces you want to keep. The stronger, hotter, and now agitated acid requires that the copper clad board is extremely clean and the photoresist used to mask the stuff you want to keep must be a very high quality. Also the resolution of this photoresist requites a much more precise form of UV exposure and development (about like developing old film photos).

So you need a better mask development toolchain, better quality photoresist. You might get away with not using photoresist at all in some other cheaper low end processes. You need the highest quality copper clad that etches more evenly, and you need a stronger acid to etch quicker straight down because a slower acid will move further sideways and ruin the thin traces to keep.

The pic has old school dip chips in a static resistant foam. Those are the classic standard 1/8th inch (2.54mm) pin pitch. The easiest types of boards to make yourself are like the island soldering style board with the blue candy soldered on. That is a simple coalpits oscillator for testing crystals. Then there are protoboards like the homemade Arduino Uno pictured. Then you get into the etched boards. Some of these were done with a laser printer toner transfer method. That is like the least accurate DIY and somewhat analogous with the cheapest boards from a board house. Others were made using photoresist. This method is more accurate but involved and time consuming. One of the boards pictured is a little CH340 USB to serial board with a USB micro connector. That is getting close to my limits for etching easily. Another board has a little LCD and text. There is a small surface mounted chip pictured on the foam and that is a typical example of what kinds of pin pitches are common for the cheapest level of board production. Now there are two USB-C female connectors pictured. One has a larger pin pitch and is made for USB 2.0 connections and power. However, that other one with all those tiny tiny connections at the back – that is a full USB-C connector. That thing is a nightmare for tiny pin pitch. There is also a USB-C male connector with a little PCB attached. These are the types of solutions people have tried to come up with where only some small board is actually of a much higher resolution. It is not the best example but I’m not digging further through stuff to find better.

The actual pins on the little full USB-C connector are inverted to be able to flip the connector. There is a scheme present to make this a bit easier to match up the connections but it is still a pain in the ass to juggle everything around. All of the data trace pairs are differential too, which basically means they must be the same length between the source and destination. So any time they are not equal, the shorter trace must zigzag around in magic space you need to find just to make them even.

Pin pitch means how tiny the physical pins in the connector can be spaced apart.

IR drop losses happen because a wire has resistance, it isn’t a perfect conductor. 28AWG wire has about 0.22ohm/m. Given a 2 meter cable, you might expect to see 0.44ohm one-way. Current is also travelling back, so the circuit “sees” another 0.44ohm. That’s a total of 0.88ohm

A wire will cause voltage drop following ohm’s law. V=I/*R. So for 1A of current, you will see 0.88V lost.

Say you’re trying to charge at 15W (5V 3A), your phone is only going to ‘see’ 2.36 volts, and 7.9W are wasted in the cable.

For a 100W device (20V, 5A), 4.4V are lost, also meaning 22W are wasted.

There is an issue of some kind where the current limit is not reliable and requires additional circuitry. I think GreatScott YT was who went into that one.

He’s got 99 chargers and USB C ain’t one.