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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.
Green Plug is now trying to drum up public outcry through a (slow) website
I'm sure posting a link on slashdot will make that website a lot faster. ;)
My blackberry, and bluetooth earpiece both charge off mini-usb. I've got a mini-USB to nintendo DS adapter (fits in the DS case nicely) and the only other mobile electronics I use are my electric shaver (stays in the bathroom) and iPod (charges in the FM broadcasting cradle in the car) during my drive to work. USB 3.0 is supposed to handle 1.5amps, or three times what it is designed to handle currently.
Just because the company has the name "green" in it doesn't mean it's automatically a substantially better idea than what already exists (mini-usb) and what is in the pipeline (USB 3.0).
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There is little reason to even get a universal power adapter. USB is standard for just about every modern phone today along with most low-cost MP3 players, etc. There are a multitude of reasons not to go with a universal power adapter other than "the evil corporations are making us pay more". The most obvious one is that some devices require more power than others. Other reasons are some of the port sizes are too large/small for the device to be useful. For example, a tiny MP3 player might not have room for even a mini USB plug, however it can use the headphone jack to power/sync it. Similarly larger electronics may need more secure connections (as in not falling out, not like encryption) than others. Some might need to be designed to be easily yanked out, others might need ways of making sure it doesn't fall out.
For just about all popular gadgets, it is very very easy to walk into almost any store and get a replacement or third party cable. About the only industry that I would see benefiting from this is laptops, a standard laptop connection cable (like desktops) would be a lifesaver some times.
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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.
USB was around for years, but it didn't explode until Apple forced the issue with the iMac.
I'd say there are two reasons USB took off. The first is Intel. It started putting it on all it's chipsets which made it in most Wintel computers by default. I believe they also didn't charge licensing fees on their controller implementation so others could copy/improve it for free and not have to start from scratch. They just recently did the same thing with their USB3 controller.
The other thing is what it was competing again. There really wasn't that much other there. If you wanted low bandwidth, you'd either hijack the PS2 port or one of the serial ports. If you wanted high bandwidth you either had your own expansion card (tough), piggybacked on the printer port (often didn't work as pass though), or used SCSI (expensive). You couldn't have multiple parallel devices, so you'd need extra cards if you wanted to do that. If you had many serial devices (like a modem, a tablet, etc) you might need an extra serial card. It was a mess. USB just simplified everything, and the hub concept was a nice addition.
Intel forced availability before it became popular, and Intel made it a relatively cheap option. It was a huge improvement over the mishmash of old connectors for the consumer. Then Apple came along and made it mandatory forcing a huge number of devices on the market (where many weren't before since USB wasn't popular).
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My wife lost her phone charger and bought a replacement for $70!!! Can't be more than a few dollars worth of parts and plastic. Pretty obvious that they wouldn't want to jeopardize that income.
I was really looking forward to charging my electric SUV via USB. Now my hopes are dashed!
... and then they built the supercollider.
Either my Google-fu is weak, or GreenPlug's "standard" is of the "Well, if everybody in the entire world licences our technology, it will be standard" flavor. Unimpressive. If you are all fuzzy and care about bunnies and the earth, then come up with an open spec(which, incidentally, we largely have for low power devices, in the form of USB, and could probably come up with pretty easily for higher power stuff by producing a 12 or 24 volt USB analog). If you just want to have every electronic widget ever depend on your proprietary chips, then fuck you.
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!
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What? It had enjoyed steady increase in use. Apple went to it becasue more people were using USB then firewire, AND manufacturers where clearly moving towards USB for devices.
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Here is what I remember:
USB stuff was hard to find and expensive. There were some specialty stores on the internet that sold all USB stuff but at local computer stores USB stuff was here or there. Most people seemed to still use PS2 mice, modems were mostly serial, printers were mostly parallel, and so were most scanners.
Then Apple released the iMac.
Within a few months it became trivial to find USB peripherals. They started to have different price points (low, medium, and high end market segments for things like modems). USB mice were everywhere, USB video cameras showed up, things improved.
It was increasing in use, but it was no where near critical mass until Apple forced the issue. It was like SATA. Motherboards came with both (IDE and SATA) but IDE stuff was available for quite a long time after (especially in optical drives). I'm of the opinion that Apple took what was going to be a normal transition (things slowly speed up, pick up momentum, and eventually take over) and put it in hyper drive (made adoption look more exponential that it would have for probably a year or two, if not more).
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I fail to see why replacing a myriad of proprietary solutions with a single proprietary solution is supposed to be a good thing.
I would just be happy if all manufacturers would put voltage and polarity indications on their products.
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I was thinking about making something just like this. Currently sitting on my desk, I have my laptop, 2 external hard drives, a wireless router, a USB hub, and a cell phone charger, some speakers, and an LED desk lamp (powered by another cell phone charger). Except for the speakers and the laptop, all these devices take 12V and/or 5V. I was thinking about getting a small ATX (or similar) power supply and adding some connectors for power. Then I would cut the proprietary end off each gadget's power supply and turn them into adapters for my "standard" connectors (.1" headers would probably work well). That way I could make a cord exactly as long as I need, and I only have to have one power cord plugged into my surge protector, instead of 3 wall-warts and 2 power cords. It would also make my desk neater since I wouldn't have bundles of coiled up cords that are longer than I need.
Here is the maximum power requirements of everything that runs at 12V or 5V. During normal use, I will never max out everything, so I could probably get away with a 120VAC to 12VDC power supply and a PicoPSU or something similar.
8A @ 5V; 40 watts
5A @ 12V; 60 watts
From the web site: "Green Plug is the first developer of digital technology enabling real-time collaboration between electronic devices and their power sources..."
First class marketspeak, that is. Collaboration, you say, between electronic devices and power sources. In real time. Using digital technology. Do I need to worry about my devices and power sources becoming mutinous, then?
Or can I just stick with USB which seems to power almost every electronic device I carry around? I daresay I don't actually know WHERE the chargers that came with most of my devices are, since I just charge them all though USB. Green Plug has already lost its battle. The only hope they might have is to embrace and extend the USB standard.
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China has enforced the law to require all new cell phone to use standardized USB power adaptors since last year, to cut down adaptors in landfill. Why is democratic, earth-caring nation dragging its feeds?
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