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The issue with the Nintendo Switch is that Nintendo designed their own faulty USB-C charging implementation rather than merely using the reference design. It's

by stewx 4y ago

The issue with the Nintendo Switch is that Nintendo designed their own faulty USB-C charging implementation rather than merely using the reference design. It's not a failure of the spec, it's a failure to adhere to the spec. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16706803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16706803

Nextgrid 4y ago
It's still not a great spec if it's so complex that you can screw it up. I understand the complexity for data, but for power I wish it was as simple as power & ground wires and that's it. Compare that with USB-A where even cheap Chinese cables from the lowest bidder usually work (work well enough at least - you might get voltage drop but it will still charge if you leave it on long enough) because the spec is so simple that even the worst manufacturers manage to do a good enough job, and it's something you can trivially DIY if you need to. Now compare that with USB-C. So many moving parts that can go wrong and so much corners that can be cut by unscrupulous manufacturers. Not to mention that even the most expensive devices (Apple) don't give you any visibility on what type of cable/charger/etc you have even though that information is technically available to the device (that's how it negotiates power delivery) which is extremely confusing even to tech-savvy people.
- bratbag 4y ago
  Thats a very strange statement to make. Should complex things not have a spec?
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    My point is that I don't like USB-C because it tries to do everything and manufacturer must implement that "everything" properly which adds cost & frustration. Compare USB-C power delivery and the 12-pin cable & connector with USB-A's 4 pins and a resistor on the data lines to communicate allowed current draw, or even a barrel jack with the standard 19V ~3A PSU and no negotiation at all. Which one is the easiest to build (hint: one is easy enough to DIY) and which one is more reliable?
- tmhrtly 4y ago
  Power and ground wires alone don't cut it sadly when you're dealing with much higher wattages. There needs to be a level of negotiation between the host and the charger to decide on a specific power (current & voltage) that both can support. In USB-A this was accomplished through a hodge-podge of different resistances applied across data lines, not officially part of the standard but just done by manufacturers. USB-C is a huge improvement on this. I do agree however that the cable-labelling situation is awful. Maybe some kinda tier system could help. Every charger, cable and device could have a class. The charging rate is the lowest of the three. E.g. a "Class 5 cable will charge up to 200 watts and has a pink end". If you pair that with a Class 2 charger (say, 50 watts) and a class 3 laptop (100 watts) you'll be limited to charging your laptop at 50 watts.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    > I do agree however that the cable-labelling situation is awful. The new rules mention that and aim to fix it by demanding clear labels.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      I’d like to see where the labels are put. It’s not like there’s a lot of room on a cable for legible printing. And any kind of plastic flag wont last.
    - Aerroon 4y ago
      You mean the ones on the packaging?
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >It's still not a great spec if it's so complex that you can screw it up. People and companies can screw thing up royally regardless of spec complexity when there's no review/oversight involved. That's not a valid argument. If you want to force and check adherence to a spec you need to involve certification authorities (TÜV, SGS, UL, etc.) but then widget prices would increase dramatically. Edit: to address the child comments below: who gets to be the judge of the complexity of the spec? If Nintendo fucked it up but some EE students can get it right through side projects on github, does that make the spec complex or does that make Nintendo incompetent (lacks a HW review/qualification process)? The spec could be as simple as "white wire goes to positive terminal, black wire goes to negative terminal" and there's still the chance of an implementation fuckup in the design pipeline, especially in large projects/companies with distributed siloed teams like Nintendo due to poor internal communication, if there is no proper internal review/qualification process in the design loop. Edit 2: I looked at the USB-C charging specs and they're easy enough to understand for any graduate EE and for any company who's had some basic experience with USB as a whole, let alone 100 year old multi-billion HW conglomerates like Nintendo. IMHO, Nintendo's USB-C charging fuckup is 100% on them. I wish people would stop needlessly defending them here. Edit 3: Also, what if Nintendo intentionally chose not to follow the spec in order to force the users to use and buy only original parts from them? Either way, incompetence or malice, you really can't blame the spec here.
  - remus 4y ago
    I think it's a reasonable point. A more complex spec is going to be harder to implement correctly.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      And more expensive to boot.
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    It is a valid argument because the more complicated the spec, the easier to mess up the implementation.
  - 4y ago
- kaba0 4y ago
  Do you have any reason to believe that they "screwed up" due to a spec being complex, over much more likely explanations like.. they simply didn't want to follow the spec?
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > I understand the complexity for data, but for power I wish it was as simple as power & ground wires and that's it. The minimum requirements are that you have to support the USB 2.0 protocol: > While BC1.2 is still supported over USB Type-C because it depends on the USB2.0 lane, a significantly simplified and higher power current capability mechanism is also implemented. This simplified approach involves resistor pull-down/ pull-up relationships. These pull-down/pull-up resistors are connected to the CC wire and the upstream facing port (UFP) must monitor the voltage on the CC1 and CC2 pins in order to detect the current sourcing capability of the down- stream facing port (DFP) it is connected to. This is a substantial improvement over the complicated handshake mech- anisms involved with USB BC1.2. > The basic USB Type-C current capabilities are Default USB (500mA for USB2.0 and 900mA for USB3.0), 1.5A@5V, and 3A@5V. * https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/appnotes/00001953a.pdf https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/appnotes/00001953a.pd...
- vilhelm_s 4y ago
  USB-C is infamous for being complex like that, but I think the charging part is basically fine? People talk about the Nintendo Switch often, but I have never heard any _other_ example of something where the charging didn't work, so I think maybe it's a rare exception. (This is distinct from the "fast charging" mode(s?), which does seem to have compatibility problems. But in that case, the failure mode is that device charges slowly, which is probably not a big issue for the kind of small phones/gadgets that the EU regulation targets. The previous standard was micro-USB, which can't do fast-charging anyway.)
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    I plugged my switch into my laptop and the switch started to charge my laptop. I thought it was funny.
- interestica 4y ago
  I wanted to get a trimmer with USB-C. Unfortunately, all that I found would not allow c-to-c charging. Only charging from A. The 'A' basically allows a 'hot wire' type charge to go through for power. C-only charging requires negotiation. There's no way to tell up front that the charging is limited like this and manufacturers don't want to highlight it.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    You can build your own cable by buying a "USB-C trigger" (as they're called on eBay), it's a board with a USB-C port and a power delivery controller chip that's preconfigured for the specified voltage.
    - interestica 4y ago
      This is the information I needed. Thank you!
maccard 4y ago
And how am I supposed to know that when looking at a device that has a USB-C port for charging, and the instructions on the charger [0] say "Nintendo Switch can be charged by plugging the AC adapter into the console's USB Type-C connector." [0] https://store.nintendo.co.uk/en_gb/-nintendo-switch-power-adapter-000000000002510646.html https://store.nintendo.co.uk/en_gb/-nintendo-switch-power-ad...
- gpderetta 4y ago
  You are not supposed to, but it seems to me that the blame is on Nintendo, not with USB-C.
  - xxpor 4y ago
    Nintendo always does something that's JUST slightly off with their consoles that make them annoying as hell to use. With the switch it's the screwed up USB-C implementation and the fact that you can't use bluetooth headphones (it has BT support, but only for the controllers) With the DS, the wifi only supported WEP, not WPA, even though WPA2 had been released by the time the DS came out The Wii famously didn't support HD output.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      The Switch was updated to support BT headphones, with the caveat that you can only have 2 BT controllers simultaneously connected with the headphones, and the controllers can’t be switched while headphones are in.
      - Teknoman117 4y ago
        The reason for the limitation is bandwidth and latency. Multiple devices on one Bluetooth controller have to timeslice in 4 millisecond (iirc) chunks. Audio devices in a high quality mode consume a substantial amount of the overall bandwidth. It also doesn't matter if your packet consumes the full size of a chunk of not, all of them are equally sized. You'd have to do two audio chunks and one controller chunk * 2 controllers to maintain a 60 Hz sample rate on the controllers.
mrjin 4y ago
It's obviously the failure of the spec. Why cables with different capabilities have to look exactly the same? Put the looking aside, I wondering if anyone can tell what's the exact differences between different specs? USB standards are already a mass, USB-C just made things 10 times if not 100 times worse.
- jethro_tell 4y ago
  lol, no they just didn't implement the spec.
rbanffy 4y ago
It looks like Nintendo would have to fix that in order to comply with the regulations. The bare minimum, if I read it correctly, is to label the port and charger making it clear what their limitations are.
miohtama 4y ago
My Macbook Pro charger charges Nintendo Switch, so maybe this was fixed later? Switch is 2017 device.
- DeRock 4y ago
  I have a device from launch, and remember for the first while this didn't work, but now does. It must've been fixed at some point with a SW update.
- mattnewton 4y ago
  For me, it will charge but not power the dock for playing on a TV.
  - univerio 4y ago
    There's a specific PD profile (15V IIRC) that your charger needs in order to be able to power the dock, and older MacBook chargers didn't have it.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  I have a launch-model Switch, and it still has trouble charging even on latest firmware. It's very possible that this is one of the "Mariko" fixes; Nintendo silently released a refresh of the Nintendo Switch before the OLED model was announced, dubbed the Mariko models. These had a number of changes, including but not limited to: - New, more secure boot sequence - Updated Nvidia Tegra board - ~20% better battery life - Reinforced chassis design It seems likely that they took the opportunity with Mariko to redesign their charging ICs to be more tolerant. I heartily recommend looking up some of the more subtle differences between the models too, it's really interesting to see how Nintendo updated a mass-market product without anyone really noticing.
  - jnovek 4y ago
    Just to make this thread a bit more aggravating, I have two pre-Mariko switches — at least they both have the Nvidia Tegra vulnerability, anyway — and I have yet to see either fail to charge on random USB-C cables and chargers. As another poster mentioned, however, they will only dock with the OEM charger. Seems like whatever is happening with the OG switch USB-C implementation it’s not straightforward.
vineyardmike 4y ago
Creating a spec that people don’t want, can’t, or can’t afford to adhere is a failure. I don’t recall ever seeing prior USB devices fail at adherence. The problem is that USB C is a massive spec with a lot of things that aren’t always needed in it (display, pd, high data speeds etc). You can either design your product to implement a lot more things (eg Macs) or skimp out and cause confusion (Switch). By breaking the standard, people effectively have to buy your charger or cables to know it’ll work. If I have to either buy a high end product or buy cables and chargers only from the original brand, we aren’t really any better off with this.
- camdat 4y ago
  >I don’t recall ever seeing prior USB devices fail at adherence. Really? You've never seen a power only micro-usb cable (missing 2 bus lines)? I have dozens from all types of devices that use USB as a charging only connector. This has been a problem with every USB iteration (hard to have the U in USB if you aren't able to handle a wide variety of applications), but I vastly prefer it to the early 00s when you might have 5 different cables to each "specialty" application.
- bpfrh 4y ago
  I think any protocol that wants to implement a wide range of features will be complex. Afaik if you don't need these you can just implement the parts you need e.g. charging.
- tankenmate 4y ago
  Sure we are, if they don't conform to the spec then they can't get a CE mark; which then means it can't be sold in the EU and the device misses out on a 350~400M person market.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  Or maybe Nintendo just decided that they didn't care. I really don't see how any technical specification could be expected to physically prevent everyone in the world from deliberately implementing it partially or incorrectly. I don't doubt that USB-C might be technically complicated and confusing compared to alternatives and predecessors, but I find it very difficult to believe that Nintendo engineering gave it their best shot and simply couldn't manage to do it correctly.
johnwalkr 4y ago
It may not be fully compliant to the spec but it does always charge in my experience. It will charge eventually from most any usb-c charger, including Apple's. But, a docked switch requires 15V and not all chargers will provide it, or maybe they just don't provide it to the off-spec switch. Similar story with the HDMI output of the dock. It took a bit of research to buy a charger and HDMI adapter that work with both my switch and macbook, but it was possible and it's nice for travel.
- mmis1000 4y ago
  It's even funnier that. Even your charger have 15v. The dock something failed the handshake and require you to unplug and plug again to trigger the 15v. I think the switch is just not spec compliant. That shouldn't happen on a device that implement the spec properly.
nonethewiser 4y ago
> It's not a failure of the spec, it's a failure to adhere to the spec. Which means 1 spec is not sufficient for interoperability

by stewx 4y ago

Nextgrid 4y ago

It's still not a great spec if it's so complex that you can screw it up. I understand the complexity for data, but for power I wish it was as simple as power & ground wires and that's it. Compare that with USB-A where even cheap Chinese cables from the lowest bidder usually work (work well enough at least - you might get voltage drop but it will still charge if you leave it on long enough) because the spec is so simple that even the worst manufacturers manage to do a good enough job, and it's something you can trivially DIY if you need to. Now compare that with USB-C. So many moving parts that can go wrong and so much corners that can be cut by unscrupulous manufacturers. Not to mention that even the most expensive devices (Apple) don't give you any visibility on what type of cable/charger/etc you have even though that information is technically available to the device (that's how it negotiates power delivery) which is extremely confusing even to tech-savvy people.

bratbag 4y ago
Thats a very strange statement to make. Should complex things not have a spec?
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  My point is that I don't like USB-C because it tries to do everything and manufacturer must implement that "everything" properly which adds cost & frustration. Compare USB-C power delivery and the 12-pin cable & connector with USB-A's 4 pins and a resistor on the data lines to communicate allowed current draw, or even a barrel jack with the standard 19V ~3A PSU and no negotiation at all. Which one is the easiest to build (hint: one is easy enough to DIY) and which one is more reliable?
tmhrtly 4y ago
Power and ground wires alone don't cut it sadly when you're dealing with much higher wattages. There needs to be a level of negotiation between the host and the charger to decide on a specific power (current & voltage) that both can support. In USB-A this was accomplished through a hodge-podge of different resistances applied across data lines, not officially part of the standard but just done by manufacturers. USB-C is a huge improvement on this. I do agree however that the cable-labelling situation is awful. Maybe some kinda tier system could help. Every charger, cable and device could have a class. The charging rate is the lowest of the three. E.g. a "Class 5 cable will charge up to 200 watts and has a pink end". If you pair that with a Class 2 charger (say, 50 watts) and a class 3 laptop (100 watts) you'll be limited to charging your laptop at 50 watts.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  > I do agree however that the cable-labelling situation is awful. The new rules mention that and aim to fix it by demanding clear labels.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    I’d like to see where the labels are put. It’s not like there’s a lot of room on a cable for legible printing. And any kind of plastic flag wont last.
  - Aerroon 4y ago
    You mean the ones on the packaging?
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>It's still not a great spec if it's so complex that you can screw it up. People and companies can screw thing up royally regardless of spec complexity when there's no review/oversight involved. That's not a valid argument. If you want to force and check adherence to a spec you need to involve certification authorities (TÜV, SGS, UL, etc.) but then widget prices would increase dramatically. Edit: to address the child comments below: who gets to be the judge of the complexity of the spec? If Nintendo fucked it up but some EE students can get it right through side projects on github, does that make the spec complex or does that make Nintendo incompetent (lacks a HW review/qualification process)? The spec could be as simple as "white wire goes to positive terminal, black wire goes to negative terminal" and there's still the chance of an implementation fuckup in the design pipeline, especially in large projects/companies with distributed siloed teams like Nintendo due to poor internal communication, if there is no proper internal review/qualification process in the design loop. Edit 2: I looked at the USB-C charging specs and they're easy enough to understand for any graduate EE and for any company who's had some basic experience with USB as a whole, let alone 100 year old multi-billion HW conglomerates like Nintendo. IMHO, Nintendo's USB-C charging fuckup is 100% on them. I wish people would stop needlessly defending them here. Edit 3: Also, what if Nintendo intentionally chose not to follow the spec in order to force the users to use and buy only original parts from them? Either way, incompetence or malice, you really can't blame the spec here.
- remus 4y ago
  I think it's a reasonable point. A more complex spec is going to be harder to implement correctly.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    And more expensive to boot.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  It is a valid argument because the more complicated the spec, the easier to mess up the implementation.
- 4y ago
kaba0 4y ago
Do you have any reason to believe that they "screwed up" due to a spec being complex, over much more likely explanations like.. they simply didn't want to follow the spec?
throw0101a 4y ago
> I understand the complexity for data, but for power I wish it was as simple as power & ground wires and that's it. The minimum requirements are that you have to support the USB 2.0 protocol: > While BC1.2 is still supported over USB Type-C because it depends on the USB2.0 lane, a significantly simplified and higher power current capability mechanism is also implemented. This simplified approach involves resistor pull-down/ pull-up relationships. These pull-down/pull-up resistors are connected to the CC wire and the upstream facing port (UFP) must monitor the voltage on the CC1 and CC2 pins in order to detect the current sourcing capability of the down- stream facing port (DFP) it is connected to. This is a substantial improvement over the complicated handshake mech- anisms involved with USB BC1.2. > The basic USB Type-C current capabilities are Default USB (500mA for USB2.0 and 900mA for USB3.0), 1.5A@5V, and 3A@5V. * https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/appnotes/00001953a.pdf https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/appnotes/00001953a.pd...
vilhelm_s 4y ago
USB-C is infamous for being complex like that, but I think the charging part is basically fine? People talk about the Nintendo Switch often, but I have never heard any _other_ example of something where the charging didn't work, so I think maybe it's a rare exception. (This is distinct from the "fast charging" mode(s?), which does seem to have compatibility problems. But in that case, the failure mode is that device charges slowly, which is probably not a big issue for the kind of small phones/gadgets that the EU regulation targets. The previous standard was micro-USB, which can't do fast-charging anyway.)
- oneoff786 4y ago
  I plugged my switch into my laptop and the switch started to charge my laptop. I thought it was funny.
interestica 4y ago
I wanted to get a trimmer with USB-C. Unfortunately, all that I found would not allow c-to-c charging. Only charging from A. The 'A' basically allows a 'hot wire' type charge to go through for power. C-only charging requires negotiation. There's no way to tell up front that the charging is limited like this and manufacturers don't want to highlight it.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  You can build your own cable by buying a "USB-C trigger" (as they're called on eBay), it's a board with a USB-C port and a power delivery controller chip that's preconfigured for the specified voltage.
  - interestica 4y ago
    This is the information I needed. Thank you!

maccard 4y ago

And how am I supposed to know that when looking at a device that has a USB-C port for charging, and the instructions on the charger [0] say "Nintendo Switch can be charged by plugging the AC adapter into the console's USB Type-C connector." [0] https://store.nintendo.co.uk/en_gb/-nintendo-switch-power-adapter-000000000002510646.html https://store.nintendo.co.uk/en_gb/-nintendo-switch-power-ad...

gpderetta 4y ago
You are not supposed to, but it seems to me that the blame is on Nintendo, not with USB-C.
- xxpor 4y ago
  Nintendo always does something that's JUST slightly off with their consoles that make them annoying as hell to use. With the switch it's the screwed up USB-C implementation and the fact that you can't use bluetooth headphones (it has BT support, but only for the controllers) With the DS, the wifi only supported WEP, not WPA, even though WPA2 had been released by the time the DS came out The Wii famously didn't support HD output.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    The Switch was updated to support BT headphones, with the caveat that you can only have 2 BT controllers simultaneously connected with the headphones, and the controllers can’t be switched while headphones are in.
    - Teknoman117 4y ago
      The reason for the limitation is bandwidth and latency. Multiple devices on one Bluetooth controller have to timeslice in 4 millisecond (iirc) chunks. Audio devices in a high quality mode consume a substantial amount of the overall bandwidth. It also doesn't matter if your packet consumes the full size of a chunk of not, all of them are equally sized. You'd have to do two audio chunks and one controller chunk * 2 controllers to maintain a 60 Hz sample rate on the controllers.

mrjin 4y ago

It's obviously the failure of the spec. Why cables with different capabilities have to look exactly the same? Put the looking aside, I wondering if anyone can tell what's the exact differences between different specs? USB standards are already a mass, USB-C just made things 10 times if not 100 times worse.

jethro_tell 4y ago
lol, no they just didn't implement the spec.

rbanffy 4y ago

It looks like Nintendo would have to fix that in order to comply with the regulations. The bare minimum, if I read it correctly, is to label the port and charger making it clear what their limitations are.

miohtama 4y ago

My Macbook Pro charger charges Nintendo Switch, so maybe this was fixed later? Switch is 2017 device.

DeRock 4y ago
I have a device from launch, and remember for the first while this didn't work, but now does. It must've been fixed at some point with a SW update.
mattnewton 4y ago
For me, it will charge but not power the dock for playing on a TV.
- univerio 4y ago
  There's a specific PD profile (15V IIRC) that your charger needs in order to be able to power the dock, and older MacBook chargers didn't have it.
smoldesu 4y ago
I have a launch-model Switch, and it still has trouble charging even on latest firmware. It's very possible that this is one of the "Mariko" fixes; Nintendo silently released a refresh of the Nintendo Switch before the OLED model was announced, dubbed the Mariko models. These had a number of changes, including but not limited to: - New, more secure boot sequence - Updated Nvidia Tegra board - ~20% better battery life - Reinforced chassis design It seems likely that they took the opportunity with Mariko to redesign their charging ICs to be more tolerant. I heartily recommend looking up some of the more subtle differences between the models too, it's really interesting to see how Nintendo updated a mass-market product without anyone really noticing.
- jnovek 4y ago
  Just to make this thread a bit more aggravating, I have two pre-Mariko switches — at least they both have the Nvidia Tegra vulnerability, anyway — and I have yet to see either fail to charge on random USB-C cables and chargers. As another poster mentioned, however, they will only dock with the OEM charger. Seems like whatever is happening with the OG switch USB-C implementation it’s not straightforward.

vineyardmike 4y ago

Creating a spec that people don’t want, can’t, or can’t afford to adhere is a failure. I don’t recall ever seeing prior USB devices fail at adherence. The problem is that USB C is a massive spec with a lot of things that aren’t always needed in it (display, pd, high data speeds etc). You can either design your product to implement a lot more things (eg Macs) or skimp out and cause confusion (Switch). By breaking the standard, people effectively have to buy your charger or cables to know it’ll work. If I have to either buy a high end product or buy cables and chargers only from the original brand, we aren’t really any better off with this.

camdat 4y ago
>I don’t recall ever seeing prior USB devices fail at adherence. Really? You've never seen a power only micro-usb cable (missing 2 bus lines)? I have dozens from all types of devices that use USB as a charging only connector. This has been a problem with every USB iteration (hard to have the U in USB if you aren't able to handle a wide variety of applications), but I vastly prefer it to the early 00s when you might have 5 different cables to each "specialty" application.
bpfrh 4y ago
I think any protocol that wants to implement a wide range of features will be complex. Afaik if you don't need these you can just implement the parts you need e.g. charging.
tankenmate 4y ago
Sure we are, if they don't conform to the spec then they can't get a CE mark; which then means it can't be sold in the EU and the device misses out on a 350~400M person market.
tshaddox 4y ago
Or maybe Nintendo just decided that they didn't care. I really don't see how any technical specification could be expected to physically prevent everyone in the world from deliberately implementing it partially or incorrectly. I don't doubt that USB-C might be technically complicated and confusing compared to alternatives and predecessors, but I find it very difficult to believe that Nintendo engineering gave it their best shot and simply couldn't manage to do it correctly.

johnwalkr 4y ago

It may not be fully compliant to the spec but it does always charge in my experience. It will charge eventually from most any usb-c charger, including Apple's. But, a docked switch requires 15V and not all chargers will provide it, or maybe they just don't provide it to the off-spec switch. Similar story with the HDMI output of the dock. It took a bit of research to buy a charger and HDMI adapter that work with both my switch and macbook, but it was possible and it's nice for travel.

mmis1000 4y ago
It's even funnier that. Even your charger have 15v. The dock something failed the handshake and require you to unplug and plug again to trigger the 15v. I think the switch is just not spec compliant. That shouldn't happen on a device that implement the spec properly.

nonethewiser 4y ago

> It's not a failure of the spec, it's a failure to adhere to the spec. Which means 1 spec is not sufficient for interoperability