USB-C PD: New Technology Done Right
hackaday.com
There is a tendency as we get older, to retreat into an instinctive suspicion of anything new or associated with young people. All of us will know older people who have fallen down this rabbit hole…

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?

  • frezik@midwest.socialEnglish
    1·
    6 months ago

    I use one of those hubs and it’s enough to charge my laptop.

    Simple answer is that higher voltage is easier to deal with than higher current. USB originally ran it 5V, which would take 12A of current to provide 60W. The wire would be 14AWG, which is 1.63mm thick. Conversely, if you increase the voltage to 20V (as USB-PD can do), you now only need 3A, and the wire can be much thinner/cheaper.

    The wire doesn’t care about voltage for the most part. The insulation around it needs to be thick enough to keep it from shorting to other wires and stuff around it, but it doesn’t take much insulation to be rated for 300V; way more than we need here.