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Realized 99% of all my chargers are USB-C. This can only mean one thing. New USB bout to drop!
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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Not unless they want to go bigger. The USB-C pin pitch is too closely spaced for the lowest tier of printed circuit boards from all major board houses.
You might have some chargers get deprecated eventually because there are two major forms of smart charging. The first type is done in discrete larger steps like 5v, 9v, 15v, or 21v. But there is another type that is not well advertised publicly in hype marketing nonsense and is somewhat hit or miss if the PD controller actually has the mode. That mode is continuously adjustable.
The power drop losses from something like 5v to 3v3 requires a lot of overbuilding of components for heat dissipation. The required linear regular may only have a drop of 0.4-1.2 volts from input to stable output. Building for more of a drop is just waste heat. If the charge controller can monitor the input quality and request only the required voltage for the drop with a small safety margin, components can be made smaller and cheaper. The mode to support this in USB-C exists. I think it is called PPS if I recall correctly. A month or two back I watched someone build a little electronics bench power supply using this mode of USB-C PD.
What's this about a pin pitch? Or drop losses. It sounds interesting but I don't understand ☹️
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)