5 ms·
Afaik the power cables are substantially thicker than the data ones (and likely better isolated). There's also only 8 unique connections: power, ground and 6 da
by ben-schaaf 3y ago
Afaik the power cables are substantially thicker than the data ones (and likely better isolated). There's also only 8 unique connections: power, ground and 6 data lines. At best you could get 3x the power with the same pinout.
- Dylan16807 3y agoThose are cables that still support high speed data. If you sacrifice data, you get a lot more pins. Protocol and pinout incompatibility is a bad idea but it has nothing to do with physics.
- ben-schaaf 3y agoIf you're discounting protocol and pinout why not just change the connector too while you're at it?
- Dylan16807 3y agoBecause someone said physics won't comply, and that's silly. We're well within the physical limits of power delivery that won't catch fire. Also as a sibling comment states, it's arguably not a worse violation of those things than the existing ability to change voltage.
- idiotsecant 3y agoReview the cross sectional area of a USB cable, review NEC ampacity for stranded conductors, and get back to me.
- Dylan16807 3y agoWhat? The hypothetical was reusing the plug, not reusing existing cables. The person you were responding to explicitly mentioned that the cables would need to be upgraded. For example, a full-size extension cord can be soldered to a USB-C plug without much difficulty. Whatever wire gauge you want, it can be done. The bottleneck is the pins, and there's 24 of them.
- HALtheWise 3y agoIn this case, you would presumably make the devices start in the legacy 5V USB pinout, then only switch to sending power over the data pins when the source, cable, and sink all confirm they're specced for it. That should mean there's no protocol incompatibility any more than USB PD is an incompatible protocol.