I find it notable that this article entirely ignores the EU's Common Electrical Power Supply law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_External_Power_Supply), which effectively mandated that all smart phones sold in the EU use micro USB for power. This had a swift and noticeable effect in the diversity of connectors in phones (basically Apple is the only maker that doesn't use micro USB and this change happened at the exact time of the law). The emergence of USB as The Way Phones are Charged didn't happen as a magic emergent property, but via considered government regulation. Government: it can actually work.
USB was defacto standard for data transfer, especially on PCs, but the /connector/ on the phone side was not at all standards compliant or uniform across makes and models, and up until the passage of that law, it wasn't uncommon for the power port to be separate. Now that is basically unheard of. I'm not saying the law is the only reason for this change, but it is clearly a big factor, yet it is omitted from this article.
Indeed, it was common for a USB-to-proprietary cable to be sold separately for at an additional charge. Now phone manufacturers are forced to resort to software to make it difficult to move data between phones and desktops. ;-)
I think it's still a design that is far larger than it needs to be. You could reconfigure the plug to use blades like the US and be in parallel like the italian plug. Then you can add shutters, shrouded pins, polarized pins and fuses and still be incredibly more compact. On top of it, the design will work well with folding plugs like many camera battery chargers yet still be grounded. That combination seems like the best.
Most of that is good except for the fuse. The only reason for the fuse is because of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_circuit which was only used during copper shortages.
The fuse makes the plug much much larger than it needs to be.
The American size, with some shrouding, would be better. Newer American plugs already have shutters and everything else you mentioned.
From the link:
Europlugs are only designed for low-power (less than 2.5 A) Class II (double-insulated) devices that operate at normal room temperature and do not require a protective-earth connection.
Compliance is voluntary with the underlying threat that 1. the commission would define and impose a standard if manufacturers didn't voluntarily do so, and 2. the EC could use stronger coercion if the MoU was not respected/complied with.
If it had been such a good and manufacturer-supported idea, they wouldn't have waited the EC's intervention to suddenly and massively abandon proprietary charging ports.
> The emergence of USB as The Way Phones are Charged didn't happen as a magic emergent property, but via considered government regulation. Government: it can actually work.
This is such nonsense, I don't even know where to begin. This was already the case in the US and there is no government mandate for it to be that way.
Are you going to give credit to the EU for that too?
They simply passed that regulation after it was already clear that things were going to end up there. It was a recognition of the status quo, it had zero effect.
> This is such nonsense, I don't even know where to begin. This was already the case in the US and there is no government mandate for it to be that way.
History please.
The USB-socket-in-the-phone standard for recharging phones started once China demanded _de jure_ in 2006 that all data-enabled phones could be recharged using mini/micro-USB. That request had a huge impact: at that time Nokia produced phones with data-only USB ports that could not be used to charge the phone. Suddenly "+1" and "C" models of Nokia's phone started appearing, all with the ability to charge using the USB port. Initially these models where sold only in Asia, then the producers started selling them everywhere, just to streamline the production.
Then, in 2008, the EU Commission asked the producers of mobile handsets to agree on a standard, whatever standard. If they could not came up with a single solution the Commission threatened that they would _impose_ a solution.
In 2010 all the big producers agreed to use micro USB. That was an easy choice, as they were already forced to use it for all the phones sold in China.
In 2010/2011 the CEN and ETSI standardization bodies sat down and produced a spec that mirrors the micro-USB spec.
Now, in 2013, the EU is about to set the CEN spec in stone.
Governments played a big role here. China's regulations first and EU "pressure" later is what lead us to the current status.
It sounds about right to me. For example, I have a Samsung phone that predates the EU agreement by a couple of years and even though it charges off 5V at USB current levels and uses USB for data syncing, the charging/data connector is some proprietary Samsung one and it can't charge from a USB port with the official cable. There's a couple of Samsung connectors, Sony Ericsson had one, Nokia favoured barrel jacks with various oddball voltage and current requirements, and Motorola Razr phones used the mini USB port for charging in a way that was incompatible with everything else.
> This was already the case in the US and there is no government mandate for it to be that way.
Hah, in 2009? It really, really wasn't. I bought an off-the-shelf flip phone in 2010 that still used some godawful proprietary connector.
One of my roommates had a phone that used mini-USB, but it was the wrong end (mini-A instead of mini-B), which is a lot like buying an MP3 player and finding a 3.5mm prong sticking out of it instead of a socket. I absolutely do credit government intervention in China and the EU with forcing manufacturers to clean up their act.
No, the EU mandate certainly had a large effect in the US. Why would manufacturers bother using two different charging port standards per model when they're only being compelled to use one? You must have a short memory if you've already forgotten just how recently the market was still riddled with Mini-USB and a hodgepodge of other connection formats.
It's a pity that our history of low voltage DC connectors has been so poor. The 12V cigarette lighter connector is awful, and yet it became, slowly, the standard for 12V connections. The USB cable is not exactly brilliant either. The article touches on it, but the fact you basically don't know which way it goes in until you attempt to plug it in is awful.
Hopefully the manufacturers will have the sense to move towards a slightly more sane connector to use in everything. I think the fear that it has to be backwards compatible is less prevalent now than it used to be (micro USB has completely replaced mini USB in most situations). I'm looking forward to sane relatively high power DC connections everywhere.
Be sure to talk to the ham radio guys and RC car guys first, who have a couple decades experience with almost uncountable number of DC power "standards", or you'll just poorly reimplement something they already figured out back in 1970 or whatever.
The Anderson Powerpole seems a rather effective and cheap way to shove a couple hundred watts of DC around. Of course there must be millions of existing connectors all operating at 12 volts so applying it to a 5V standard will be problematic at best. I have them all over my house given my electronic interests. Do NOT listen to people who complain about them, much like the legendary PL-259 connector or soldering SMD device by hand, 99.99% of the population just does it no problem without drama but the 0.01% who can't be bothered to learn how, make sure to very loudly tell everyone about how it never works, etc. Its tiresome but traditional.
The molex family seems most effective at demonstrating the flammability of overheated nylon, at least at power levels over a hundred or so watts.
The ancient Cinch plugs worked sorta well, although they're a bit large and fiddly.
Coaxial DC connectors are something of a standard although few can handle a hundred watts, at least at low DC voltage.
A miniaturized version of the standard used for intelligent electric vehicle charging would be interesting. There's probably a patent preventing innovation, but maybe in a few decades when existing patents run out thus permitting innovation to start again...
The Powerpole "standard" has also been completely disregarded. The housing color is suppose to represent the voltage, but now it's been co-opted to the point where you see red and black as + and - 13.8v.
That's the nice thing about standards, there are so many conflicting ones to choose from. And you are correct before hams started using powerpoles in wholesale lots, the mfgr had a semi-elaborate scheme for full scale railroad wiring where the color had a meaning WRT voltage which the hams disregarded and decided to use red/black.
That's in itself is a lesson optimistic power connector designers need to learn about the past, if you "borrow" something currently used for marine power, or solar panel wiring, or forklift battery chargers, and try to do something totally different, expect some conflicts even if the new app dwarfs the old one by a couple orders of magnitude.
Yes, on a railroad locomotive engine I wouldn't randomly plug red/black ham radio powerpoles into the first railroad engine red/black that you see, its not going to be what you expected. Almost everywhere else, it will work.
>Mr Bhatt, who invented it 20 years ago, is delighted. His next plan is to make the USB cable “flippable”—so that the plug fits the socket whichever way it is inserted (for now it works only one way round). That tiresome flaw is because an original design priority was to make manufacture as cheap as possible: few believed his idea would really catch on.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the side with the USB logo faces up. Less useful when you can't see where you're plugging it, or the socket is at an angle, but it helps.
I really wish hardware makers would PAINT that side. I have no interest spending more than one neuron-firing figuring out which side is up by looking at both sides under appropriate light. I've taken to spray-painting my USB connectors, in a nice steampunk hammered copper. If a device needs connectors to be face-down, I paint the down side (i.e. the "real upside") of the socket on the device, too.
I don't care about the 0.2mm USB logo relief. PAINT that stuff up. Contrasting colours, with the USB-logo side BRIGHT and SHINY, please.
I'm not sure I follow. It has the USB logo on one side, and the Apple logo on the other side in the same colour and size. Which means if you aren't paying attention you'll over try to put it in upside down (because the logos look so similar).
What I have never figured out is why they don't color coordinate which side is up or down. Green is up, red is down. It would give a instant visual idea of which way to plug it in. Can't image it would cause the cost to go up.
If I understand correctly, based on what you said and comparing it to the rainbows on wikipedia, a trichromat would be fine with red vs green, since they are distinguishable, but nearby colors to those (red -> orange, green -> blue) look more similar (different shades of the same color). And looking into it some more, a dichromat would be fine as well because the two colors would be distinguishable because green would be essentially dark and red would be light (i.e. "the dark side goes up" in the USB example).
You do realize USB ports can be vertical, and usually are on (USB-enabled) wall outlets, displays and desktop computers right?
And that's the simple case of vertical (flipped 90 on the long axis compared to most laptops) with USB-enabled extension cords lying on the floor, you plug straight down.
So rotate in one direction for vertical for consistency, and color-code the plug for everything that could benefit from it. Matching red/green is far easier than "which side has that mostly-invisible black piece of plastic".
> So rotate in one direction for vertical for consistency
There is no consistency, your USB port may be on the left, right or back of your screen, what's the useful thing to standardize then? And it can jut out from a wall. And on a desktop tower, the USB port can be on the front or the back, and the user may install the machine so it is accessed from the left, the right or either.
Left/right/back of screen is still the same direction. If it's counter-clockwise from green-up, it's green-left everywhere, including walls. On anything parallel with the floor you're right - so color-code the plug.
Quite a few years ago when USB was new, a trip to the local hobby store with about $3 cash resulted in a green model builders "paint pen" which is pretty much what it sounds like, a felt tip pen that releases paint. The paint dries out inside the pen after a couple years. I would imagine depending on your local graffiti problem these might be banned even more severely than spray cans, although in a civilized area they should be available?
Anyway the next discovery is I charge my phone face down to protect the glass, so I have to plug in upside down. Rightside up and Upside down connectors are commercially available for PCBs because the manufacturers have no idea which side might be up in a finished product. So you've converted the problem from figuring out which side of a cable is up, to memorizing which devices you own that have to be flipped upside down. Of course a dot of the same color paint fixes that although it might look ugly on a phone if done sloppily enough.
A greater annoyance is should the USB charger input be on the top, bottom, right or left side of all phones? I think I've seen it all.
Google managed to colour-coöordinate their Glass charger, so that the wall plug is black-white the same way the cable is, but didn't have a good answer for how to do the device side of the plug.
In addition to the other issues with this, a standard orientation would require either the PCB the connector's mounted on to be orientated a certain way (potentially having a knockon effect for other design decisions in the device) or require a whole load of different PCB mounted USB connectors. Both would add cost which the manufacturers would much rather do without. In the cheapest devices, the orientation of the USB port would probably be the first thing to go out the window, making the whole exercise redundant.
What's needed is a robust connector with an easily visually determined orientation and the sort of power transmission capabilities that the new USB PD standard has.
I think here the main point, not that good developed in the article, is that the devices powered by USB power have access to the data bus, that is they can be intelligent as such. For example, as a fellow commenter, the USB-powered fan, in a intelligent house, with a USB-outlet (let's call it that way) can actually recognize that is a fan, and can start it if in the house the temperature/humidity is going over a limit, or lower the RPM if the temp has changed. And so on....imagination is the limit, thing of light bulbs, etc, you name it.
The house-computer would automatically recognize such home devices and have rules, like on our computers ( like, oh, this is a HDD, let's offer the option to mount it, etc), would recognize fans, etc.
So this could be the start of an intelligent house. I feel some start-up would deal with this at some point.
The more likely result is you already have poison flash sticks and people putting autorun files in USB supposedly dumb machines. So plug in a hacked USB desk fan, and your laptop is now owned if it enables autorun. There already commercially exist "sanitized" USB cables and adapters which only pass the two DC current leads and don't even have the two data leads wired, so you can plug J. Random Hacker's supposed USB gadget into your laptop without getting owned.
I doubt it. Or I doubt that you understood the idea. How can I put a autorun file on my USB mouse? it's the same idea. If the device is not a USB storage device, how it can serve files? Or why do you imagine that the intelligent house ( and not my laptop - where did you get that? ) would run, hello?, Windows ( the horror ) ?
I think, if something like that would be developed, the base would be 100% on linux. You can plug to my Linux machine any USB device, can't think that you can own it. ( unless you link to some clever exploit ).
I think you missunderstood the idea. A smart house system will be invariably an embedded system, and not a generic multi purpouse PC, which you all reply-ers immediatelly implied.
There is no need for USB mass storage drivers. It will probably have an own class ( USB-home-automation ) that can only do/read/write some sort of data. This kind of closes any type of attack vector based on making the system execute arbitrary code.
So I don't see the fuss with autoruns, or some obscure USB sound card buffer overrun - which was fixed the next day : this will not happen.
LOL its really easy. You've got an empty box of mostly air, so you open it up, solder four wires in parallel, done. All you need is for the victim to plug it in once for a few seconds. Yes this is why its dumb for windows admins not to disable autorun.
"can't think that you can own it."
The flash contains linux_installation.sh with:
#!/bin/bash
clear
echo Run this file as root to install the closed
echo source USB mouse driver for your
echo new "whatever" brand USB mouse.
(insert lots of stuff most folks won't understand which owns the machine and certainly didn't come from any mouse mfgr)
I think you could have hilarious fun on air-gapped networks plugging in wifi dongles and bluetooth dongles mounted inside a USB gadget. How your system responds to gaining a keylogger or another extra HID device or another extra network device would be interesting to watch. Just a COTS keylogger could be interesting.
How do you know the other end of that cable is a mouse unless you dissect the mouse first?
How do you know the other end isn't flash storage? How do you know it isn't a USB hub with a flash device also connected so you'll never notice the mouse doesn't work? What if the mouse is set up to present flash storage with auto run only after it has been connected and left idle for at least a few hours?
USB is not often exploited... but that just means we currently have few defenses and little for security in place which becomes a concern if we start connecting our homes with it. And to other homes. And businesses.
This whole article can be summed up with the one sentence: >The big change next year will be a new USB PD (Power Delivery) standard, which brings much more flexibility and ten times as much oomph: up to 100 watts.
The remainder of the article seems to epicly overstate the benefits. I found the reaches out to multi-building solar panel connections especially "out there" and that's coming from someone who _loves_ solar panels. It's just that solar panels and the talk about "poor neighborhoods with no access to AC mains" are veerings straight off the deep end.
The reason data centers use DC is to keep the space-consuming transformers that go from AC to DC away from the dense, expensive racks of equipment. Most homes don't have that constraint. Yes, it's possible we'll have DC jacks alongside AC jacks in our homes, but will that really change our lives significantly?
There were posts about switching power supplies (and Apple's dubious claims to have invented them) on HN a few days ago. The consensus is they save space, but was that really worthy of being called a revolution? Only in the strictest most limited definition of the word.
Finally, w/r/t to the Internet of Things. This is where the writer's glib worship of updated standards is the most violent. _USB is not an internet network_. It requires a host. USB is not suited for it. Ethernet will win. Ethernet always wins.
Ethernet's magnetically isolated transcievers are a bit pricey, though. Recently I've been wondering about rallying the Arduino crowd behind RS485 or CANBUS for this sort of connected cheap device network.
That (CANBUS and RS485) works ok as long as everything agrees on what "ground" is. Using differential signaling (as both those standards do) does give you some noise immunity and does help with the ground issue somewhat.
The problem is that ground loops can easily generate 10's of volts at the highest impedance point, and there will be ground loops if you try to use this for "smart homeish" things. Most bus drivers and receivers aren't meant for voltages that high--many drivers/receivers have absolute maximum ratings only a few hundred millivolts below ground.
Isolating everything isn't a conceptually difficult thing to do, but you'll spend just as much on optoisolators as you would have on ethernet magnetics.
Ethernet is just part of the picture, allowing communication between homes but not necessarily between devices. Of course, since both California and Britain mandate ZigBee in their smartgrid projects you could say that ZigBee has already won, but that's at a level opaque to consumers.
Personally, I find Apple's new cables much more useful - smaller plugs, and you don't need to worry which way is up or down. I wonder, however, if it could transmit the same amount of energy, but even if it could not, another standard could be made with bigger/thicker cables, but similarly useful plug.
More expensive, more complicated, patent encumbered, and difficult/expensive to licence.
As much as I would like a reversible USB cable I'd prefer micro-USB which is just universal at this point (and cheap) to an expensive cable supported by one manufacturer.
Plus Apple Lightning is not really smaller than a micro-USB.
I didn't mean that the whole world should just adopt Apple's cable; instead, a new one could be developed, that is actually useful (i.e. as useful as Apple's cable).
In that case expect to see a multitude of world-wide, multi-year lawsuits about how Apple owns this idea and how its patented and yadda yadda yadda.
In this current US-led lawyerocracy, it's better to play it safe and just not poke the dragon with a stick.
USB is a ubiquitous standard by now. Sure it could have been a better standard, but at least now we have a standard (sans Apple). That is definitely a change for the better.
If they made USB ports reversible they wouldn't be USB anymore, and not just in shape either, the technology required to make them reversible also requires devices both upstream (e.g. computers, power bricks) and downstream (phones, tablets, etc) to "understand" that the port could be communicating in either of two modes (reverse and non-reverse, and to flip the data channels accordingly).
The technology exists. Just would require starting again from scratch.
> I wonder, however, if it could transmit the same amount of energy
The Thunderbolt cable is specced for 10W, which is more than existing USB standards (1.5A @5V for USB3 "Battery Charging Specification", previously 500~900mA @5V, leading many — including Apple — to perform proprietary power negotiation to allow sending >~10W to their devices).
But it is much less than the more recent USB Power Delivery spec (which I guess is the subject of the article), which allows up to 5A @20V
I do like their new connector, however I'm concerned about what it is in the connection that wears.
In MicroUSB the springs providing force/friction to keep the connector in the device are in the cable. That means as it wears out, you should only have to replace the cable.
Where does Apple's wear? After the 10,000/25,000/50,000 insertions, do I just need to buy a new phone?
I'm far from an electrical expert, but I don't understand how this will save power for the majority of people. Won't we just be converting from AC to DC one step further up the electrical chain? It's not like the power company is going to start sending me DC. I get that it will benefit people with solar, which is nice. But that's far from the majority of people.
Any electrician want to correct my ignorance on this?
I think the article puts forward one point - if the number of devices using DC is large enough, the load will become much less variable. Less variable loads mean one power supply can operate at peak efficiency rather than having many sitting idle most of the time.
I'm not completely convinced that this makes sense though. Any low voltage DC distribution network will need fairly thick wires to distribute anything but trivial power levels. The power lost in the cables over tens or hundreds of feet would probably make any efficiency gains fairly moot. The efficiency of modern switched mode power supplies is fairly high, and my understanding is that the no-load power use is almost trivial (milliamps).
One issue that seems to have surfaced recently is that there's loads of very, very cheap AC-DC power supplies which are awfully made. It would definitely make sense for a single high quality supply over a bunch of cheap, noisy and dangerous ones, but I think the best solution is investing slightly in wall-socket based power supplies of a known quality.
As an aside, power transmission with DC is actually quite a lot more efficient than AC. The reason AC won the power race was the ease of voltage change with transformers. As solid state power electronics improves, we're going to see more and more DC based transmission lines. We're probably centuries away from a DC grid (if ever).
The problem with "buy high quality wall socket supplies" is that it is impossible these days to tell where the line is between "high quality, but off-brand" and "low quality, being sold at a huge mark up".
"power transmission with DC is actually quite a lot more efficient than AC."
And the subject to google for is insulation breakdown and compare the equations relating peak voltage and RMS voltage. Intuitively you need to insulate a high power transmission line to handle the highest voltage it'll ever see at any instant, which and unfortunately the peak voltage is a microscope amount of time at the tiny peak of the sine wave, but the DC equivalent power you can get out of a sine wave is only the much lower RMS voltage, whereas a DC line can carry peak power continuously, so for a given line $100M budgeted toward cable insulation can insulate more power if its sent as DC rather than AC.
This is a simplification, but take a bell curve and flip it upside down and that graph applies to efficiency, economic cost, and ecological damage per watt for DC power supplies along the y-axis and wattage along the x-axis.
At 2013 technology levels its a real bad idea on many different levels to provide 100 total watts of DC power via 50 separate power supplies to 50 devices when you could have just one DC supply.
As an example of sillyness, imagine if every chip inside a desktop PC required a completely separate wall wart power supply instead of sharing one common DC supply. Thats basically what an elaborate laptop setup replicates if you have a lot of external devices, especially if you're proposing running your room lights off the same system, etc.
The same curve at the higher end rather than lower explains why you'll likely not be running a kitchen stove or a HVAC system off low voltage DC anytime soon. Although that would be intellectually interesting to see. A massive array of mosfets to switch, and power leads thicker than water pipes (maybe actual copper water pipes for cooling?). It would be a sight...
For large datacenters, DC can be a big improvement. http://gigaom.com/2012/01/13/the-next-big-thing-for-data-cen... But this is mainly where UPSes are involved, or solar power. That might not be relevant to a house, but it could have other advantages besides efficiency. Imagine all your computers had tiny DC-DC converters instead of heavy, hot bricks of inverters. Laptops would only need a cable to charge instead of a power brick.
I don't think builders will risk alienating users of non low-power appliances (a fridge, a hoover or an electric kettle).
Plus it's not like drawing two cables (AC and DC) and installing mixed wall plugs (with both AC and DC/USB sockets) is more complex than just single cable and AC sockets.
Might not be more complex, but it'll be a long time before it's compliant with any building codes. You can't run LV anything in the same runs as your AC lines.
For several years you can buy COTS wall sockets with an embedded switching power supply squirting out USB power to a USB connector, so from an electrician's point of view its just a funny looking, somewhat large, extremely expensive standard wall socket.
Except this completely defeats the purpose. You no longer have a central DC supply, but instead have a wall-wart converter build into the wall instead of hanging off the plug.
This would actually be less efficient than the approach in the article, as you are increasing the number of idling DC supplies, not reducing them.
Ah. I was intending to comment more on the claim that electricans would install AC and DC runs (aside from most building codes and common sense requiring AC and low voltage unprotected DC to be run more or less physically separately) +5V switchers the size and shape of a light dimmer with a little USB port have been COTS for many years now, for dorms and hotels and stuff, so its more likely the electrician would run 120 AC to some convenient spot in the room where its converted to 12V at high(er) current rather than a parallel scheme where the electricians homerun both 120VAC and 12VDC to a combined circuit breaker panel or some such.
Or in short (oh bad pun), DC power supplies are COTS and electricians know exactly what to do with them.
It is inevitable if you had parallel wiring they'd mess it up. Wanna be home electricians are made fun of all the time for screwing up 3 simple obvious wires line neutral and ground, giving them +5 would just result in fireworks. Admittedly most of the electricians making fun of the home wiring guys are the same pros who blow up 3-phase machinery by swapping a phase on an occasional basis too...
Oh god. There's electricians out there that don't even know what 3-phase is. It's scary.
That and all the DIY guys building rotophases to power their cheap 3-phase equipment they got on auction, only to realize their 120/240 in their garage won't cut it.
Isn't the problem with wiring buildings with low voltage DC that we'd need really thick cables to avoid a large voltage drop in (and heating of) the cable itself?
For a big house, with long DC runs, you could lose quite a bit of power, negating any savings from having a single more efficient power supply.
It's definitely tidier to have a single supply, but I'm not sure you'd see increased efficiency. You'd also need double the wiring in the buildings. Retrofitting buildings would be a nightmare.
My personal thought is that all houses should have AC and Ethernet throughout the walls. Phones can use VoIP through the ethernet, and the ethernet can be used as a DC supply via PoE. Obviously PoE would have to become more robust and ubiquitous, but it makes more sense than running dedicated DC (or phone) lines throughout a building.
I used to build my own PC's back then, and I could see the USB revolution coming. I waited, and waited, and waited... It took years for most PC motherboards to adopt USB. The complete lack of innovation in the PC market is frustrating. They're still mainly huge, ugly, trash can size devices.
Now, there's another great connector standard from Intel (Thunderbolt), and it basically gets almost no attention in the race to the bottom PC world.
The need to support legacy and not adopt newer technologies, form factors, etc, really hurts the PC markets. If just 10% of this market adopted the Apple "screw legacy and give me great design", we'd get a lot cooler PC's.
