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Universal Power Adapter Struggling For Support
Ian Lamont writes "Last year, there was a lot of hopeful discussion surrounding an initiative to have the consumer electronics industry standardize their products on a USB-based universal power adapter devised by Green Plug. Eight months later, the effort has stalled. The reason: manufacturers have balked from using Green Plug's technology. '... Gadget makers seem to have no compelling financial incentive to adopt Green Plug's technology. It would require them to add Green Plug's chip, or similar hardware and software, into every phone, camera, or music player they build, making them more expensive and more complicated to build. Another stumbling block for manufacturers: A universal power supply would kill the market for replacement power supplies. Manufacturers sell these at a steep markup price to customers who lose or break the original one that came with the device, and aren't tech-savvy enough to procure a low-cost generic replacement.' Green Plug is now trying to drum up public outcry through a (slow) website, but the number of supportive comments and votes remains relatively low."
...will become a standard power connector with or without these clowns. It's just about perfect for powering and/or charging just about any handheld device, and with Apple leading the way I expect that USB connectors will start showing up in airplanes, cars, and other such places very soon.
Whatever genius MBA thought that manufacturers would gleefuly license some special connector/protocol just to be able to charge their own products should be taken out back and shot. The language on their web site is absurdly disingenuous in stating the the device-side stuff is free. What benefit is that to the device manufacturer? Do they expect major device manufacturers to promote their proprietary chargers out of the goodness of their heart? What a crock.
Whenever something becomes a commodity it destroys any profits the producers make. Of course THEY like it that you can't just use your standard plug in every device. They get to sell you an extra power supply for your car and one for work/travel. Then when you replace the phone, they make sure your new phone is incompatible with the old plugs so they can sell them all again. Great for electronics producers, bad for consumers. The cost to them of being compatible is a non-issue.
USB is 5v. USB2.0 maxes out at "5" units of 100mA, with USB3.0 providing a staggering "6" units of 150mA. Thats .5A and .9A. That gives you 2.5 watts and 4.5 watts. There are proposed additions to let USB source up to 1.8A if the port is not sending data, and up to 1.5A in low speed mode.
Looking at the numbers, the whole notion that USB could ever become the dominant standard for power seems laughable to me. USB may be a convenient means of providing a trickle charge, but with batteries getting considerably higher C rates we need 10x beefier power supplies than what USB will ever be capable of.
Power Over Ethernet+ (PoE+) is targetting 24w: thats no quickcharge, but unlike USB its least enough to run a small computer.
Sorry it's not USB -- it requires the proprietary Green Plug chip to work.
They are trying to sell their chip by having us push the manufacturers into making mass purchases of the chip ( or chip schematics) because we "demand it".
And they are trying to sell this "initiative" as a standard without releasing the chip schematics to a standards organization.
And more importantly, how are they involved? USB is already a standard. This isn't rocket science. The standards are already agreed upon. China managed to require a universal power supply, and they can't even get their human-rights in order. All it takes is one "standard device end", one "standard source end" and an agreement over what the upper and lower limits are! We have lots of those! Not just USB, either!
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
110 volts * 15 amps = 1650 watts.
5 volts * 1.5 amps = 7.5 watts.
Looks to me more like you need 220 USB ports.
Compared to USB's 5V @ 1A (5W) limit or Power over Ethernet's 13W, Firewire can supply 60W. It's also always been a true bus rather than USB's Host/Device architecture, automatically being able to connect devices and computers to each other like USB On the Go is trying for. It's assymetric plugs are easier use without looking and were inspired by the original GameBoy cables for child and adult proofing. Of course patent holders initially charged too much ($0.25, then $1, now free) and the chips used to be too expensive for slow devices like mice and keyboards. Guy who helped design it: http://www.teener.com/firewire_FAQ/ Apple's licensing: http://developer.apple.com/softwarelicensing/agreements/firewire.html
I don't think this can happen. There are actually economic disincentives for those in control of the manufacturers to adopt a standard like this. I applaud the altruism here, but it fails to "incentivize" the standardization for the manufacturers. Manufacturers - those in control of mass production - are not so much intent on realizing the full collective efficiency and savings of mass production as they are in twisting the whole process to benefit them and slightly disadvantage those who buy their product. They waste resources and labor on unnecessarily frequent redesign cycles and impose planned obsolescence and proprietary schemes, all in the name of disproportionate profit. The end result is a waste and perversion of the collective potential of mass production.
What Green Plug proposes makes PERFECT sense from an altruistic, socialistic, Big Picture perspective... which also means it makes absolutely NO sense to these corporate CEOs because they expend NO mental energy on such unimportant things.
Having said that, I'd like to point out that one company has produced a power supply design that in some ways is actually BETTER than the Green Plug standard: Kensington. Yes, that Kensington. They have a series of true variable-output DC power supplies which have a rather unique way of powering a wide range of different devices that require different voltages and current; I have one myself, a model 33197 (I actually have "last year's" model that uses a rather proprietary cable, but apparently this most recent one uses a standard USB cable in the design. It has a five-pin DC output jack, to which a cable attaches that has a female plug on the other end; there is a series of "tips" which connect to the end of the cable, and it is these tips which actually determine both the physical attachment method to a device AND the voltage and current. There are tips available for virtually every laptop, cellphones, even one for my old HP iPAQ hx4700 (which is a REALLY weird one).
I believe the Kensington design works by the tips creating a feedback loop of some sort with the power supply proper, communicating through one or several of those pins precisely what voltage and current to supply. It strikes me as quite ingenious. I have no idea what specific mechanism this feedback loop employs, because I haven't yet reverse-engineered one of the tips to see what makes it tick.
So what Kensington has produced is a 3-24VDC, 6A, 120W variable output DC power supply that, with a proper tip, can power virtually any device that falls within its output specs. They have already anticipated the vast majority of common devices, and can easily produce others as the need arises. Of course I'd rather see the whole thing open sourced, but that again is the difference between altruism and harsh Darwinian reality. Regardless, I think what Kensington has created could very easily become a standard even superior to what Green Plug proposes.
You could always modify a USB cable such that it only carries the ground and +5V lines.
If you think USB is scary for the host, check out Firewire's ability to automatically DMA into the host's address space: http://md.hudora.de/presentations/#firewire-pacsec
If you think USB is scary for the host, check out Firewire's ability to automatically DMA into the host's address space.
I know about that. I once reported it as a Linux kernel bug, because the driver unconditionally turns that feature on. It's almost never used. The hardware has a bounds limit register for externally initiated read/write operations, and you can set that to 0. Amusingly, it's unconditionally set to allow access to the first 4GB under Linux, even for 64-bit systems.
But there are people who want that feature, for debugging.
(By the way, it's not really "DMA". It's not even a fast function. You can only read or write one word per packet tranaction. FireWire is really a local area packet network, with addressed packets; the hardware interface usually has rings of packet buffers just like an Ethernet driver. There are packet types which emulate reading and writing "device registers", and that's how control functions are performed. This sort of makes it look like a "bus". But it's not. The memory of the machine is only exposed if the driver lets it be exposed.)