Realized 99% of all my chargers are USB-C. This can only mean one thing. New USB bout to drop!

yup!

People with a new phone every 2/3 years never need to use angled charger treatment, which i find i need to do too often these days

That's it re-stoking the internal combustion engine. It's perfectly fine

This pic gave me an aneurysm irl

Wish granted: You get USB Interactive-C

Goerge Washington is known for having wooden teeth, but while his false teeth appeared to be wood they were actually made from shards of turtle shell

As Obnoxious as these notations sound, I'd rather have all the usbc subtype broken out and labeled differently. At least then id have a clue if this usb cable I found is going to actually work with any given device. It's totally trial and error now. We finally got a respectable physical inferface and widespread adoption, but under the hood it's as messy as ever with different protocols.

I prefer USB-C#

At least Croatian, so I'd assume other balkan languages as well as potentially Czech and Slovak would use it. I think Latvian does as well.

Lithuanian, actually lots of languages, even Russian has a č sound.

take manufacturer's claims

divide by 10

half it

half it again

you now have the max your device will ever reach, with the usual speeds being ~60% of that

(my isp says 300mbps, divide by 10, half, half, 7,5mbps, which i think i never saw since the speeds are actually from 3 to 4)

Wireless charging is nice for when you're using your phone infrequently, such as at your desk while you're working on something else. It sits there charging, you grab it to respond to a message then set it back down. No tail to worry about, it's not getting tangled on other wires when you dare to move your phone, etc.

It's really a feature I never cared about until I got a wireless charger as a gift

I've had several phone where the USB socket stops working reliably. At that point it's easier to use a wireless charger.

Yes, it's usually pocket fluff in the socket and it can be picked out, but it takes some time and care to avoid damaging the socket.

My latest case (Otter) also has a cover that is awkward to open to plug in the lead, so there's that too.

As a bonus the charger works with Apple and Android so very convenient as my kids are Macolytes.

I guess from a consumer perspective, it can be more convenient (e.g. wireless charging in a car)

For me, I see it as a way to reduce wear on a charging port, or as an alternative if the port does fail.

I like it for the latter as I don't like my devices to be inefficient but it makes me feel better that should the USB-C fail on my phone, it's not game over for my phone.

There's the regular wireless charging where you need to put the phone on exactly the right position. That one is totally useless, since it's even less flexible than cable charging. The only upside is that you don't need to physically insert the cable. That's pretty much worthless.

There's another setup that allows you to charge over a larger area, e.g. a whole desk. That is expensive and/or much work, since it needs to be integrated into the whole area (e.g. desk) and it's incredibly wasteful in terms of energy consumption that doesn't actually end up charging the phone.

The only real upside I can see of wireless charging is that you can use it if your USB C port is worn out and doesn't work any more.

The best way to learn a language is through immersion. Honestly I feel like it would be a lot of fun to learn a language in Europe since the majority of people also speak English well if you really need to fall back to that.

There's good and bad. Every few months the EU tries to ban encryption without backdoors again for instance, because "oh dear, think of the children!".

Ireland speaks mostly English as far as I know.

Lucky for you, you can get around with English in most places.

Ireland didn't leave the EU, so that's an option.

In most big cities you can get around just fine. In some you can actually live very comfortably.

As far as laws go, as an EU citizen one is entitled to communication with any public institutions one may come across in their preferred "official language". Stuff like paying your utility bills, registering health insurance, similar bureaucratic stuff, as well as getting stopped by the police. You can insist on doing it in any one of 28 languages, including English.

Usually that's a bit overkill, and whoever you're dealing with will be happy to speak to you in English or find someone else who does if they don't. I assume the same goes for non-citizens. German and French are also quite popular, but English is by far the most ubiquitous.

Any Scandinavian country should have a population ranging from proficient to fluent in English.

There is a special place in hell for those fuckers

Man I've nearly thrown things away because of this. Things where I would've been too lazy to pursue a warranty claim, but still pissed that they didn't work.

Try multiple chargers and cables and it just won't charge. Try USB-A brick with A to C cable and it starts charging. Fucking hell.

I've got a chinesium rechargable battery/tire inflator which only charges when plugged into some chargers because it clearly doesn't support USB-PD

I'm glad I watched some video on this I vaguely recalled, as I may have accidentally thrown a shaver away because it wasn't charging...

Things like simple microcontrollers with only USB 2.0 support are still the cheapest around plus they have other upsides over the stuff supporting USB 3.0 - namelly being simpler, less powerful and hence consuming less power, so for some things they're the best option because you don't really need the processing power of an ARM core - and then there are all sorts of hardware single purpose integrated USB 2.0 and even USB 1.0 microchips (which implement a single, hardcoded, part of the USB protocol), so it makes some sense for the cheapest devices to not have support for USB PD charging or other USB 3.0 functionality.

From my experience with Chinese suppliers (ages ago) it's almost the opposite of what you say: the competition over there is crazy and almost always price based, so they'll do crazy shit to shave some cents off the price of their hardware, hence all sorts of cheap hardware from China which comes with a USB-C connector but really only supports USB 2.0 or earlier charging, hence USB-C is realy doing stuff the same way as in the USB-A times.

Also a lot of small Chinese electronics manufacturers aren't exactly sophisticated in their in-house design capabilities, IMHO: there are a lot of cottage factories over there doing simple electronics like keyboards or mice (or even simpler) were most of the complexity is in some easy to use integrated circuits that somebody else designed (and then right next to those guys there are others designing their own Single Board Computers or Smarthphones)

Or it's just a very cheap item. I recently bought a rechargeable disposal cannabis vape while out of town for work, I asked the dude for the cheapest dispo they had, bought it and it had a fucking micro USB on it.

Some homeless guys problem though not mine, I probably only used 50mg of the 1g cart and didn't have to recharge it, so gave it to some homeless dude before I left.

Yeah. It was already happening circa USB3. It’s not because of the connectors, but the broadening spectrum of requirements of client devices.

Maybe USB-C was a missed opportunity to address it, but it certainly didn’t “start the fire”.

Would have been nice for some kind of forethought on a labeling system.

But there's so many combinations now of power, data, audio, and video, and sup glasses of thunderbolt, display port, HDMI. Even if you put a 4-digit code on every cable listing exactly what they support people would never be able to understand and track down backward compatibility.

I'd be surprised in the next port change if we don't end up with some fiber optic in there.

In all seriousness, this would make the most sense in terms of progression in design. It already sorta' is just that, but it's been stepped on.

Hah! Just hit me, if I'd seen a USB-C plug back in the day, my first thought would've been "oof, someone isn't playing bootleg cartridge games for a while!"

It would be hilarious if they made it exactly like a headphone jack, but the USB-D slot wouldn't support headphones.

There are now sixteen competing standards.

https://m.xkcd.com/927/

What a fantastic reference

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)

Pin pitch is ultimately the spacing between traces. The traces are not as big of an issue as the actual spaces between the traces. This clearance is where things get tricky with making printed circuit boards. The process of masking off some circuit is not that hard. The way the stuff you want to keep is isolated from the copper you want to remove is the hard part. One of the issues is that you need an acid to take away the copper, but not the mask, but copper has a thickness. As the copper is etched away the acid moves sideways into the thickness too. Copper never etches completely uniformly either. The larger areas of open copper that need to be removed will etch much faster than a bunch of thinly spaced gaps. One of the tricks to design is finding ways to etch consistently with the process you build.

If you want to make super tiny traces that still have the right amount of copper and have all the gaps etched away consistently, the process of the etching toolchain becomes more expensive. You will need a stronger acid with a very good way of removing the etchant that is close to the copper and loaded with copper already. This is usually done with a stream of small bubbles, but it is risky because it could impact the adhesion of the masking material over the traces you want to keep. The stronger, hotter, and now agitated acid requires that the copper clad board is extremely clean and the photoresist used to mask the stuff you want to keep must be a very high quality. Also the resolution of this photoresist requites a much more precise form of UV exposure and development (about like developing old film photos).

So you need a better mask development toolchain, better quality photoresist. You might get away with not using photoresist at all in some other cheaper low end processes. You need the highest quality copper clad that etches more evenly, and you need a stronger acid to etch quicker straight down because a slower acid will move further sideways and ruin the thin traces to keep.

The pic has old school dip chips in a static resistant foam. Those are the classic standard 1/8th inch (2.54mm) pin pitch. The easiest types of boards to make yourself are like the island soldering style board with the blue candy soldered on. That is a simple coalpits oscillator for testing crystals. Then there are protoboards like the homemade Arduino Uno pictured. Then you get into the etched boards. Some of these were done with a laser printer toner transfer method. That is like the least accurate DIY and somewhat analogous with the cheapest boards from a board house. Others were made using photoresist. This method is more accurate but involved and time consuming. One of the boards pictured is a little CH340 USB to serial board with a USB micro connector. That is getting close to my limits for etching easily. Another board has a little LCD and text. There is a small surface mounted chip pictured on the foam and that is a typical example of what kinds of pin pitches are common for the cheapest level of board production. Now there are two USB-C female connectors pictured. One has a larger pin pitch and is made for USB 2.0 connections and power. However, that other one with all those tiny tiny connections at the back – that is a full USB-C connector. That thing is a nightmare for tiny pin pitch. There is also a USB-C male connector with a little PCB attached. These are the types of solutions people have tried to come up with where only some small board is actually of a much higher resolution. It is not the best example but I'm not digging further through stuff to find better.

The actual pins on the little full USB-C connector are inverted to be able to flip the connector. There is a scheme present to make this a bit easier to match up the connections but it is still a pain in the ass to juggle everything around. All of the data trace pairs are differential too, which basically means they must be the same length between the source and destination. So any time they are not equal, the shorter trace must zigzag around in magic space you need to find just to make them even.

There is an issue of some kind where the current limit is not reliable and requires additional circuitry. I think GreatScott YT was who went into that one.

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