Utopia: USB power sockets on every wall

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/118187-utopia-usb-power-sockets-on-every-wall

by ukdm • 14 years ago

26 37 14 years ago

freehunter• 14 years ago

My first thought was "but only 5v?" Never heard of USB Power Delivery before. After seeing the picture, I kind of want to rig something like that up in my house.

StavrosK• 14 years ago

I saw that when it was posted before, turns out you can't. There are problems with having low-power and high-power ports in the same socket, I seem to recall electricians saying it was unsafe, so you might be risking a fire with that.

ars5• 14 years ago

Yes, that's true. It's quite illegal to mix them. You are not risking a fire, but rather a shock.

The problem is if there is a failure the high voltage might be applied to the low voltage wires which are not insulated to handle that. And neither is the user who might be touching the wire that he thinks is low voltage.

imgabe2• 14 years ago

You can, it's already for sale: http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/a-power-outle...

dspillett• 14 years ago

You can (I'm sure I've seen products on the market), you just need to make sure things are properly shielded such.

I believe the concern some people have with such an arrangement is wires carrying the higher power AC inducing unwanted currents in those carrying the lower power DC. How likely this actually is to be an issue I'm not sure.

jcxplorer• 14 years ago

I recently stayed at a US hotel that had a couple of USB ports for charging devices. Since I don't like having to buy even more adapters just for travelling abroad, being able to charge all my devices at the same time was pretty handy. Are USB ports in hotels common in the US?

nodata• 14 years ago

1. The major flaw with USB is that half the time you have to try again to get the connector the right way round*

2. A 5V television? Not likely. This will lead to more types of sockets. Which is the opposite of what we want.

(* yes I know that the usb symbol should always face up, but that's often misused)

dalke2• 14 years ago

Especially when the connectors are on the back of the computer, oriented sideways.

brador• 14 years ago

I'm not an electrical expert, but:

If you have many USB ports, could you wire something up to run a television from multiple USB 5V ports or is there a voltage/amp issue of some kind in the way?

ars5• 14 years ago

Depends on how much power the TV took. Theoretically you could do it, but it would be a huge waste.

Suppose you have a 300 watt plasma TV - that's 60 amps at 5 volts. That's the kind of wire electric dryers and ovens use. You could take that wire and divide it into many small ones, but you would still have that much wire which would not be practical.

sbierwagen• 14 years ago

In principle, yes.

However, an individual connector may be rated to 100 watts, but the controller may not be able to deliver 100 watts to each of the ports it is connected to. You might have to span the TV across several different hubs.

dalke2• 14 years ago

This looks like a marvelous way to get user data. How much do you trust every USB plug you use? If you plug your phone/music player/tablet into a USB "charger" could it pretend to be a host computer, and get access to all your files without you knowing?

There's no way a USB plug will replace existing power outlets. A 15A line in the US can handle over 1400 W, which is more than the 100W mentioned here or the hypothetical 300W in the future. An induction cooktop draws around 2000W and an electric oven around 7500W.

Plus, a number of devices depend on AC power to drive a induction motor, so there's a huge installed base that can't cheaply be replaced with DC power even there's enough raw power available.

bergie• 14 years ago

Most of the devices I have enable you to decide how to use the USB connection. For example, on most Nokia phones you can choose between "charging only", "PC suite mode", and "USB mass storage".

I think my ICS Transformer Prime only provides "media device" and "digital camera" as modes, though.

mitakas• 14 years ago

Coincidentally, it's the other way around with USB dead drops.[1] Either trust that the USB won't fry your motherboard or carry a multimeter with you all the time.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_dead_drop

camtarn• 14 years ago

Ouch. I'd thought of the malware risk of plugging into a dead drop, but it never quite crossed my mind that someone could basically turn one into the equivalent of the Etherkiller:

http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/

gonvaled3• 14 years ago

Which is a clear display of one of the major flaws of capitalism: duplicity just for the sake of having a competitive advantage.

It just makes me sad to think about how much effort, materials, knowledge and time has humankind wasted in working against each other.

And, just to avoid trolling, I have to say that I am not criticizing capitalism per se, but just this one side of it.

There must be a better way!

spindritf3• 14 years ago

Is experimenting a wasted effort? Is an experimenter really working against other experimenters? Is there a better way to choose a solution to (virtually any) problem than to test multiple solutions? I don't think there is, at least not without some kind of omniscience.

gonvaled3• 14 years ago

Sure, experimenting is a great way to reach an optimum solution to a given problem.

Now please, go to your cellar and tell me for what kind of experiment are those 40+ different chargers that you have for all your devices, which most of them have exactly the same power requirements.

I would say that, in most cases, those chargers were developed in order to take that extra 1 EUR profit.

And that, *ing the customer, which somehow has been taking this mess for over 20 years.

ars5• 14 years ago

300 watt sockets? So now I need a high power DC power supply with a fan in every outlet?

Someone is not thinking this through all the way. Even at 90% efficiency you are wasting 33 watts of energy at max, and that is a LOT of heat to generate behind a wall with no ventilation.

Not to mention the power supply is not going to fit in a standard box. Or that good (read: Efficient) DC power supplies are quite expensive.

And you won't be making central power supplies in the basement either. 300 watts at 12 volts is 25 amps! You would need pretty thick cables to do that. At 5 volts it's 60 amps - that would be a wire as thick as what an electrical dryer uses.

He can have as many dreamy smiles as he wants, but this is not going to happen.

mrsebastian2• 14 years ago

What if we chose a voltage that could be transmitted throughout the house without too many issues -- like 48V?

Then we could step that down in the sockets, to 12 and 5V.

We could also use USB cables that have transformers built in, I guess -- bulges in the cable, or something. But then you're moving away from the 'one cable for everything' idea.

bhousel3• 14 years ago

I like this idea.. I've actually been thinking about something like this for a while.

You could have a DC distribution panel next to the main one, that converts the mains voltage to 24/48 VDC for lighting circuits and DC receptacles. 240 Watts (10 or 5 Amps) could be enough to power a lot of devices on a branch, while still allowing the wires to be reasonable (14 AWG or smaller).

I think the bigger win would be for LED lighting circuits, but device chargers could use it too.

jcoder• 14 years ago

http://xkcd.com/927

chrisacky• 14 years ago

When I built my office last year, I tried to find USB sockets and couldn't. It was like they didn't exist. I didn't even want ones that could supply a tonne of power, just a bare minimum would be sufficient.

In the end I retro fitting a hub to the wall that connected to my system which is hidden in the wall ,with the cables running under the wooden flooring.

mrsebastian2• 14 years ago

FWIW, they do exist: http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/travelpower/e81a/

rkangel• 14 years ago

However much current you can draw over your USB socket, it's still only 5V. Many devices want a (far) higher voltage than that for charging or powering themselves. A quick glance at my laptop PSU shows 20V, presumably related to the voltage of several Lithium Ion cells in series.

Yes, a given psu could transform the voltage back up with switchmode, but then you've got the horrible transformation inefficiency twice! I wonder how many devices there are out there that actually want that much current at 5V.

spiralpolitik• 14 years ago

Ignore the power issues and think about the security issues. Would you give some random plug in the wall hardware access to your smartphone along the same cable that data goes?

(See http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/technology/electronic-secu...)

bhousel3• 14 years ago

One could easily make "charge only" USB cables with the data pins disconnected. Or a passthrough dongle which does that.

sjs382• 14 years ago

Utopia can be simulated by carrying a little USB-to-Wall adapter in your pocket...

kabdib• 14 years ago

Standard USB connectors are rated for about 1,500 connect/disconnect cycles. You'll want something more robust built into your wall.

I've worn out the connectors on several game consoles. :-)

Utopia: USB power sockets on every wall

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