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Westinghouse Commits to Green Plug's Universal A.C. Adapter
Ian Lamont writes "Westinghouse is the first major electronics manufacturer that has publicly committed to using a 'smart power technology' that will let people use a single universal adapter to power their laptops, cell phones and other electronics. The universal adapters, which use a technology developed by a startup called Green Plug, will act like a hub that several devices can plug into, and will also shut off the power supply when the device is turned off or has finished charging. The first are expected to go on sale in early 2009 for under $100, according to Westinghouse's CTO. Eventually, Westinghouse and other manufacturers that use the technology could stop shipping adapters with their products, because customers may already have universal adapters at home. However, some manufacturers may not be inclined to use universal power adapters: the article notes Apple gets supplementary revenue from the sale of proprietary connectors for the iPod and other devices."
... and they want their idea back!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I was *this* close to finish building my collection of proprietary, non-interchangeable DC adapters!
proud caffeine whore
The cost to add the technology to a company's device is listed as US$2. The cost for a company to produce their own wall wart in China...probably less than US$2....and no licensing fees to worry about and no worries that the customer might not have a charger. This idea is going nowhere.
In this case, I think the Chinese government actually got it right. They've forced all cell phone manufacturers to provide a USB port for charging the phones. Seems like a reasonable standard to me.
Cheers,
Does that mean that I have to un-plug my lappy to charge my cell, or maybe have a $100 "all-purpose" adapter in each room so I can power my lappy in the living room, charge my cellphone in the bedroom, have my portable radio playing in the kitchen, and all the other things that use power bricks all over the house?
Do I get multiple smart power units at a hundred a pop instead of the cheapo $2 ones I use now?
Will these fancy $100 units power multiple devices at the same time, each using a different voltage?
Will it really handle an 85 watt load for a loaded laptop plus the dozen other devices that need simultaneous power for operation/charging?
Wait a minute, my WiFi base, router my cable modem, my scanner, and who knows how many other "things" in my office all have wall warts powering them. How may devices will one of these $100 units actually handle?
Naw. I'll stick with my little cheap wall warts and a power strip with a switch...
--Tomas
Have been saying this for years. For 120 AC power there's a standard plug. Why do I have to have a dozen different transformer bricks underneath my desk to power all of my computer, network, and phone stuff?
igo already has this technology today. You can get them at RadioShack, as well as online.
I have one of these; it's called a "Computer." Seriously - every necessary portable device I own charges through USB - my phone, my camera, my mp3 player, all of it.
Westinghouse is essentially trying to sell me a hundred dollar USB hub. That's progress for you.
Now I'm all for standardizing connectors when it's possible to also standardize voltage and other power charachteristics but frankly this just seems like a really bad idea.
For starters each green plug power source is likely to be larger and bulkier than a power supply that operates at a single set of charachteristics. Given that the devices that require these power supplies are usually mobile that means it just got heavier to lug your mobile phone charger on vacation. Now you might hope that in total you would save on power supplies because you could share one power source between multiple devices. But if you only bring one power supply on your trip that means you can't leave your laptop charging in your hotel room/friend's house while taking your cell phone charger with for the day.
In short flexibility will require we still own a power supply for each device not to mention the point made in the article that each vendor is still going to want to ship a power source with their item. It seems to me a better idea is to standardize on a few power profiles and connectors instead so we can simply use more power supplies interchangeably without making them support multiple voltages.
In particular it seems best if we standardized on one connector (like the great apple magnetic one) for laptop type devices and the settled on powering the small devices through the USB standard like the iphone and other cell phones. Not only does your power cable now double as a data cable but we've saved on all the excess effort that would have gone into making smart power sources offering multiple voltages.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
That is the fault of windows.
Windows will not allow high current to the usb port unless the device is seen, driver loaded, and running. Many cellphones refuse to charge USB until you install the windows driver.
It's Microsoft's fault. get a powered usb hub and bypass stupid microsoft tricks.
P.S.: it's not the computer. Under linux I can charge a device with a usb port even if no drivers are loaded. only windows does this.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You are correct. Just as you can get "USB" wallwart and car adapter chargers that put out an amp or more, there is no need for an upper limit. The trick is setting the minimum amperage that a source must supply, which would also be the maximum aperage that a client may expect(unless admittedly nonstandard). I'm not familiar enough with the engineering to know what a reasonable value for that is. I'd guess 2A or so; but that is purely off the cuff.
Also as speaking from experience, my laptop had its motherboard fried not once, but twice. Both from using third party plugs, the first was from a "universal" adapter, the second was what the guy from the maker's tech support told me to buy. Both of the times the real AC adapter's wires became broken because I *gasp* actually used my laptop to travel more then 3 feet and used it for *gasp* more then 3 hours a day. Laptop makers really should adopt a standard because of all the things about laptops I like, I really hate the power issues.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The only thing actually made by "Westinghouse" is nuclear reactors. The brand name is licensed out by CBS to Westinghouse Digital Electronics LLC, which is a front for Chi Mei Optoelectronics, a subsidiary of Chi Mei Corporation (Taiwan).
Chi Mei is probably the world's leading supplier of large LCD panels.
USB has a handshaking protocol for establishing what sort of load is attached and whether the host (hub, PC, whatever) will support the requested load's power. Many wall wart USB chargers are dumb 5V supplies. While this will satisfy some load devices, others will remain in 'low power' mode, awaiting the supply to acknowledge a request for more power. Which will never come. This may result in trickle charging or no charge mode at all.
Experts on the topic may jump in and correct me, but this is my understanding: Some O/Ss handle the USB handshaking in device-specific drivers (Windows), while others implement this function in the lowest level of their USB stack (Linux). Smart USB hubs and chargers have a microcontroller and firmware to support this protocol.
Have gnu, will travel.
USB 2.0 added the ability to draw up to 1.5amps for charging capabilities (the minimum is 100 milliamp). usb 3.0 could up the amperage even more, but again, usb will only ever put out 5 volt DC.
fortunately there are a lot of devices that can run off 5 volt DC, so usb charging instead of wall brick is starting to take off. it's much cheaper to power off usb than to include a 'cheap' wall brick. only window's implementation of usb is 'broken' so that a device needs a device driver and must be in 'active' mode to charge.
besides, if you design the device to charge off usb, you can then 'sell' a brick that costs extra and not include one for the 'price' of the device. both saving money, and adding a revenue stream.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
No Chinese firm owns Westinghouse. The history of Westinghouse is a little convoluted, but it is basically now CBS. Westinghouse was originally called Westinghouse Electric Corporation. In the 90s they bought CBS and then later renamed themselves to CBS Corporation (which then sold itself to Viacom which then renamed to CBS Corporation). Currently, the Westinghouse brand is managed by a CBS subsidiary again called Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Various companies license the rights to use the brand. CBS is, of course, a publicly traded company headquartered in the United States (New York in particular).
So no, the parent is not "interesting".
There is a problem with this. I assume that you mean 16 and 3 Volts DC. As voltage goes down current goes up. With higher current you need thicker wire. 500mA is not to bad, but if an entire house is wired up one would need 10 to 20 amps. From my work in the pipe organ industry I can tell you that anything less then 10 gauge wire will cause problems.
This is precisely why 120V AC is run in homes. It is the right balance between the amount of power that can be delivered, and the safety of exposed line voltage. If the voltage were much less the current would be too much to handle. much over 300 volts and the act of connecting to the circuit becomes too risky for "the average person."
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
because they don't have a default answer in a generic USB driver. It's one of the little digs they take so that each manufacture has to write a WHQL driver so their device will "properly" talk. This is instead of simply providing the industry standard, or most common, answer to the request when made.
They pulled the same crap with the power management specs on laptops, so OEMS could "optimize" their performance, instead of simply implementing the default optimizations from the chip manufacture directly. The reason is that it keeps devices tied to Windows drivers and keeps OEMS in the Microsoft upgrade treadmill.
if we make them standard, hotels and other places will already have one available! Sure, we might need wall-warts available for just one plug, but it would be the exception.. and everybody would have one!
It's not about the "plugs" it's about the wasted power of plugged in things that aren't being used. The trouble with Wall-warts is they are stupid and drizzle power the entire time they are plugged in, even without a device attached. What do we do? we buy and extra to take on the road, so we don't have to crawl under our desks and unplug them... so we have 5 wall-warts running with no devices all day!! That's what this product is trying to eliminate because it will shut as much power circuitry as possible when the device is not used.
First: yes, you will have just as many power supplies as items to be powered and/or recharged. Nothing new there. (Oh, that's not counting their power supply hub. But we'll ignore that for the moment.) Yes, these supplies will cost more initially than the present ones. But like any investment, it's supposed to save you money in the long run.
On the other hand, when your cell phone dies, or your electric razor, or your battery charger, you can buy a new one without buying a new power supply -- because the power supply is universal, see? Less waste in the landfill, less use of resources (one less supply to build), less money to buy the new item.
And if you dash off on a trip and forget your cell phone charger, but remember your electric razor charger -- hey, no problem! They'll just have to take turns. Or you can charge them both at night because you're not using your laptop.
In fact, any decent hotel will have a charger installed right in the wall. Just in case.
Or you're staying at a friend's house; you can borrow his.
As for the supply being bulky, they've already got a supply that can adjust to any voltage in its range.
Since the supply actually talks to the device, it will know when the device is charged, and turn itself off. Unlike the current average wall wart, it will stop using power (or only use a miniscule trickle) if the device doesn't need power.
So: Initial expense will be higher, but you'll be able to save on later purchases (because you can re-use the old supply), you'll save on power (because of lower vampiric power draw), and all the power supplies will be interchangeable.
Greenplug's web site
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
I went through the Green Plug website. Could this technology help a particular company with their family of products?
No information on power levels -- I could really use some information in I and V ranges. I could use some basic information about protocols. Is it designed for intermittent use, like charging, or can I design my widget to use one of these for full time operation?
I'd rate the website +5 for marketing speak and -200 for lack of technical detail that could give interested technical folks some basic information to decide whether to take this to the next level.
I'd happily pay an extra $5 or $10 for a device if it had an iPod charge connector.
I travel a bit and it is a royal pain in the ass to have to have to carry multiple chargers. I'm up to 5 now - laptop, phone, ipod, ipaq, and camera chargers (yes, I could scale back what I take, but I don't want to; I use all those devices a lot on the move).
It is probably one of the most common electronic devices so I'm really surprised there's not more out there. I know Apple wants a cut, but I can't imagine its more than a couple of dollars per device and I'd HAPPILY pay the extra for it. In addition to the above 5 devices I have a billion more at home that I don't want either.
While I'd obviously much rather see some generic standard take hold, I can't see that happening because these add-on peripheral things are clearly such an awesome cashcow for consumer electronics makers. In the meantime, I'm happy to let Apple rule the roost.
If this is patented, then it's doomed to fail. And a little startup together with Westinghouse doesn't sound like a good beginning. To get this off the ground, they need several laptop and cell phone manufacturers.
"While I'd obviously"
really? It's not that obvious from the text above that line.
"much rather see some generic standard take hold, I can't see that happening because these add-on peripheral things are clearly such an awesome cashcow for consumer electronics makers. In the meantime, I'm happy to let Apple rule the roost."
And it's definitely non-obvious here. If anything, I'd say it's obvious you love Apple (nothing wrong with that; certainly not calling you a fanboy or anything juvenile of the sort. I love Apple, in general, too.) and as a result of this love for Apple, will happily take it up the tailpipe from Apple when it comes to their connector (and as much as I love Apple - I do not love their connector.)
You are happy to let Apple rule the roost.. what roost is that? The 'mp3 player' roost? The 'smartphone' roost?
They may be the most popular in the former, and gaining a shitload of traction in the latter, but they're hardly ruling it.
Moreover, they're -way- off on ruling the power connector roost. Yes, they made a decent connector for power+data, congratulations Apple, even if ignoring that USB could already do this. Yes, they made a much -better- connector for power (+data) with the magnetic variant. That one I would *happily* include as a "must have" for universal power supplies if that type of connector becomes much more prevalent (patents and licensing on that from Apple are holding that back - good job Jobs, it keeps that 'exclusivity' aspect going.)
But while it isn't, and Apple is charging for licenses*, most manufacturers are not going to sell a universal power supply with an added Apple-licensed connector costing them $NNNNNNNNN when only a fraction of the users actually use the thing. They can throw in 8 different types of 5mm round plugs (this in itself annoys the hell out of me; they occupy the same space, only the inner diameter differs. wtf. but at least they don't have to pay any license money for it so I guess they stamp them out by the millions for cheap) and cover the vast majority of users and tell those who do have an iPod / iPhone / whatever to purchase a separate product.
* As of 2006/May/11 - couldn't spot a newer reference.
"Previously Apple charged 1.5% of the wholesale price per unit for use of their proprietary iPod dock connector, but as of yesterday (May 10th) the dock connector license is a flat fee of $4 USD."
$4 USD! On a simple universal charger of $29.99, that's 13%. And that is why most aren't going to include one in the base pack.
That said - companies might do well to offer one as an extra. For sale off of their website. $4+S&H+marginal profit. Question is whether Apple Legal is going to see that connector as a device on its own (thus the $4), or whether they say "oh no no no my dear man, that connector is to go with your power supply. So we will be charging you $4 per power supply."
But then, who's going to pay $4 + S&H + a marginal profit for a little plug nub (shiny, white and "Made for iPod / compatible with iPhone"-logofied as it may be) when you can get a full-on charger elsewhere for $10, and can then charge your iPod / iPhone in parallel with whatever non-Apple device you've got hanging off of your universal power supply?