USB-C Explorer – A development board to get started working with USB Type-C

https://www.reclaimerlabs.com/blog/2018/8/7/the-usb-c-explorer

by walterbell • 8 years ago

311 71 8 years ago

You know what I'd love? A tool that lets me identify what USB-C features a cable supports. As I understand it there are multiple cable variations, but it's not possible to identify visually.

It would be even cooler to have a device that you could plug into a port to identify what USB-C features the host supports, but I don't know if that's possible.

In general I like USB-C, but having such a large mix of capabilities without an easy way to identify what's supported is a big pain point.

edude03• 8 years ago

This is exactly what I'm looking for at the moment! This + passthrough would be amazing!

jjoonathan5• 8 years ago

Between USB-C and mSATA/mPCIe/M.2 it seems like in just few short years the state of hardware UX reverted from "match the shape to the hole" to "buy pre-matched / pre-assembled and don't you dare lose or mix/match anything." What happened? Psychoactive substances in the water? Hostile takeover of the standards bodies by marketroids? Anyone here have an inside perspective?

userbinator3• 8 years ago

I think it's just a grotesque proliferation of complexity and "feature-driven standards development".

slededit2• 8 years ago

The original designers thought people would just make uber cables with full support. Manufacturers noticed they could shave off a few cents removing support for features "nobody uses".

ken• 8 years ago

Simpler: Hanlon's Razor.

When engineers see 5 different physical ports, they want to consolidate, because there's no good reason for them to be different, and there are real benefits to be gained by having them all the same.

E.g., Stuart Cheshire (Chairman, ZEROCONF Working Group), 2002: "My hope is that in the future — distant future perhaps — your computer will only need one wired communication technology. It will provide power on the connector like USB and FireWire, so it can power small peripheral devices. It will use IP packets like Ethernet, so it provides your wide-area communications for things like email and Web browsing, but it will also use Zeroconf IP so that connecting local devices is as easy as USB or FireWire is today. People ask me if I'm seriously suggesting that your keyboard and mouse should use the same connector as your Internet connection, and I am."

It's a great vision, but unfortunately, on the path from here to there, features get cut. If your product needs to support 5 different protocols, and you have to cut 1 to ship on time, that's still pretty good as far as your own product is concerned (80%!). If every manufacturer does this, though, you end up with a mess of cables and connectors that aren't quite compatible with each other -- and users are more miserable than before this whole exercise started.

I don't think anyone wants their USB-C device or cable to be intentionally incompatible with another USB-C device or cable. They just don't make 100% compatibility a hard requirement.

snaky3• 8 years ago

What happened?

It became very cheap to put inside a chip. That's it.

LeoPanthera• 8 years ago

I think that's what this does:

https://www.tindie.com/products/aroerina2/usb-cable-checker/

FullyFunctional• 8 years ago

For $34, that looks pretty good (though I hate that we need this). I'd pay much more for something that could do signal integrity measurements on the cable as well.

RivieraKid• 8 years ago

And that would also check if the cable complies with the specification.

cjcampbell• 8 years ago

Just purchased a TS-80 soldering iron and have been incredibly frustrated by the power requirements. While USB-C, the device requires 2A with 9V. Out of four Type C, PD chargers, I don’t have anything capable of this combo. Shopping around for something other than a dedicated QC3.0 charger, it’s been interesting to see how few of the manufacturers publish a convenient and complete set of charging specs. Something like this will certainly come in handy.

simcop23873• 8 years ago

It's unfortunate but as you've noted, the TS-80 is QC3.0 only. This means you're going to need a dedicated charger (Though I thought the TS-80 shipped with one?). This means that it doesn't support negotiating with USB-PD devices to get the power it needs even though they'd be otherwise compatible. If they had been able to do QC 4 or USB-PD directly then it'd be a lot easier to find compatible devices (QC 4 added compatibility with USB-PD up to 27W).

borgel• 8 years ago

Quite a frustrating limitation!

voltagex_3• 8 years ago

I wonder if it'd be possible to make a QC2/3 -> PD translator? (for up to 12V/1.5A)

sitkack5• 8 years ago

Looks like I'll be sticking with a TS-100 that runs off of a Thinkpad power supply just fine.

simcop23873• 8 years ago

I'd still check out the TS-80, given a good USB battery pack it can be more easily portable than the TS-100 and some of the design changes are really nice improvements on the TS-100. I kind of hope they take them (most the tip design) and spin them into a new rev of the TS-100 for an updated setup.

The EEVBlog does a good review of things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z9es-D9_8g [TS-80 Review]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEYt2jTTVdE [TS-100 vs TS-80 comparison]

chx• 8 years ago

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Original-Xiaomi-Mi-USB-C-60W...

1×USB-A(Orange): 5V-0.3A/9V -2.0A/12V - 1.5A

1×USB-C : 5V-3.0A/9V - 2.0A/12V - 1.5A

it is quality https://lygte-info.dk/review/USBpower%20Xiaomi%20Mi%2060W%20...

cerberusss• 8 years ago

Awesome you linked to lygte-info.dk! It's one of my go-to sites to find decent tests of chargers.

Lots of reviewers simply don't do decent testing like the writer Henrik Jensen does. For instance he does over-voltage testing, which sometimes breaks an otherwise decent-looking charger.

walterbell2• 8 years ago

Additional resources:

USB-C for Engineers, https://www.reclaimerlabs.com/blog/2017/2/1/usb-c-for-engine...

An example of USB power delivery, https://www.reclaimerlabs.com/blog/2017/5/16/example-usb-pow...

Twitter thread which observes “ethernet-like” protocol over control channel of USB power delivery, https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/1035764804886126592

sitkack5• 8 years ago

Warm yourself with the tire-fire that is USB-C PD [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/1035729916149604353

jshap70• 8 years ago

I like how you can ask it for the country code the power is from

userbinator3• 8 years ago

It's scary to consider that whoever added that "feature" was probably thinking of region-locking...

Before, I used to think that hardware specifications and protocols would be simpler purely because hardware people don't really like complexity and it would make implementation harder, and that was usually the case. Now it seems like elements of Enterprise Java have slowly creeped in...

The fact that the adapter has far more nonvolatile memory than it needs is somewhat unsettling, not just in the wasteful sense but also in the "hidden surveillance device" sense.

vatys• 8 years ago

the worst thing about having read the USB PD specification is having to live with this knowledge

Having done the same, I agree completely

zhrvoj• 8 years ago

Yeah, good luck with 5A on such small pins an pcb tracks, after prolonged usage. I see many problems with existing 500mA delivery, increased contact resistance, cold solder joints, and so on. Insurance is a must have.

gumby• 8 years ago

Oh boo hoo they enumerated an enormous number of corner cases, handled backwards compatibility, crappy cables, all sorts of things. It also reflects decades of back compatibility and painfully learned mistakes (consider mini-A) not to mention some weird pathologies (weird naming like hi-speed/ full-speed/ super-speed).

It sucks that the standard is so complex that a small number of design houses and consulting shops will end up with a de facto cartel of understanding the Sacred Knowledge, but nobody's stopping you coming up to speed by reading the whole spec and doing a lot of implementing. But it's not like you can build a solid TCP stack these days either simply by reading the original late 70s RFCs.

And you don't have to use this spec -- you can still use RS-449 if you think the USB spec has become overly complex. In fact I used that in a design only a few years ago!

whitequark_2• 8 years ago

But it's not like you can build a solid TCP stack these days either simply by reading the original late 70s RFCs.

I literally did this. It's called smoltcp (https://github.com/m-labs/smoltcp) and we use it in production as an lwIP replacement with great results.

etaioinshrdlu2• 8 years ago

CS, EE, and computer engineering are going to be great careers for decades yet to come.

abraham_lincoln• 8 years ago

Is EE really a good career choice, though?

baybal2• 8 years ago

Warm yourself with the tire-fire that is USB-C PD [1]

A good idea is to not to let too many people on standard bodies.

Intel alone had more than enough clout to push the mass adoption.

djsumdog• 8 years ago

I've really wanted to take a shot at a USB-C KVM. I realize this would require USB-C DisplayPort DSPs and a lot of knowledge that's waaaaay over my head. I know some of the ViewSonics have build in USB-C KVMs, but I don't think any other monitor manufacturer has gone this route yet.

adammunich• 8 years ago

actually you just need passive signal switches for this, rather simple.

rini17• 8 years ago

Can you provide some evidence? If it is so, surely many already have done this.

AceJohnny2• 8 years ago

Oh hey, I remember chatting with the author about this project at EMSL a year ago. Glad to see it complete!

dynjo• 8 years ago

The fact somebody felt the need to build this (great work btw!) tells us everything that is wrong with this “standard”.

jradd• 8 years ago

I didn't realize you could pull 87W from the Macbook Pro adapter using USB-C!

zbrozek• 8 years ago

What's the canonical project for the source code? The links in the writeup go to github projects with deprecation warnings and links to other projects. Are there yet more projects?

What's the best one to use if you want to actually build a widget that talks to the FUSB302 and does PD negotiation?

USB-C Explorer – A development board to get started working with USB Type-C

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