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3.5mm headphone jack with hole drilled in midle carrying optical fiber would handle all use cases i can imagine. From delivering power, charging phones to conne
by harvie 5y ago
3.5mm headphone jack with hole drilled in midle carrying optical fiber would handle all use cases i can imagine. From delivering power, charging phones to connecting several 8K monitors. multiple protocols can use separate wavelengths of light, all at once in single fiber. Hundreds of gigabits are possible, maybe more, depending on the length. While still being able to connect wired headphones.
- amelius 5y agoYes, and superimpose signals on the power connection, I suppose. The only problem I see with this is that fiber optic cables are physically less robust (you can't bend them as much).
- londons_explore 5y agofiber optics are pretty robust to bending, as long as you're happy to suffer lost light. Pretty much, if you bend it too much, your connection will slow down temporarily till you straighten it again. That seems like a fine tradeoff. Industrial fiber systems usually used fixed speed, so too much bending leads to a total failure of the connection - hence the strict bend limits on fibers.
- londons_explore 5y agoI'd support this. The sockets would need some work for decent power transfer - it needs to do at least the 150 watts that USB-C can do, and preferably 150 kwatts for charging a car. For 150 watts while maintaining backwards compatibility, all that's needed is larger contact area (curved spring clips) to support 3 amps and the use of 48 volts after negotiation. For 150 kilowatts we'd be talking some cutting edge stuff, but not beyond the realms of possibility. Specifically, you'd probably need to use voltages up to 20,000 volts, 10 amps, which is going to mean you need to have mating and sealing rubber isolators on both plug and socket at least 3mm thick between poles. At these voltages, you cannot have air between the pins, so it must be a hermetic seal. You'd also need to measure leakage current and keep the cable capacitance low enough that when someone cuts through the cable with scissors the voltage can be dropped in microseconds to prevent zapping them.
- amelius 5y agoCharging a car over a 3.5mm headphone jack, that would certainly be worthy of a HN post ...
- londons_explore 5y agoThe engineer in me says I want to quit my job and spend the next 6 months and $100k prototyping a 3.5mm compatible jack that can charge a car, and safe even when licked by toddlers, underwater, full of grit, and cut with powertools... But the business person tells me that even if I could do it and make it safe enough to use, there is zero chance any big company would license the tech.
- emteycz 5y agoNo, but I'd jump at the opportunity to build my startup around your tech
- londons_explore 5y agoIf your startup has funding...
- PeterisP 5y agoCost of connectors matters. Manufacturers wouldn't want to put expensive optics adapters for every need where a cheap connector would suffice.