Getting Started With USB-C And Common Pitfalls With Charging And Data Transfer

USB-C is one of those things that generally everyone seems to agree on that it is a ‘good thing’, but is it really? In this first part of a series on USB-C, [Andreas Spiess] takes us th…

USB-C PD: New Technology Done Right

There is a tendency as we get older, to retreat into an instinctive suspicion of anything new or associated with young people. All of us will know older people who have fallen down this rabbit hole…

USB-C Power Supply Pushes Almost 2 KW

When the USB standard was first revealed, a few peripherals here and there adopted it but it was far from the “universal” standard implied by its name. It was slow, had limited ability …

A Compact SMD Reflow Hotplate Powered By USB-PD

When it comes to home-lab reflow work, there are a lot of ways to get the job done. The easiest thing to do perhaps is to slap a PID controller on an old toaster oven and call it a day. But if your…

USB-C Power For Ham Radio

Even though manufacturers of handheld ham radios have been busy adding all sorts of bells and whistles into their portable offerings, for some reason, many of them lack a modern USB-C port. In the …

Use USB-C Chargers To Top Up Li-Ion Packs With This Hack

In USB-C Power Delivery (PD) standard, the PPS (Programmable Power Supply) mode is an optional mode that lets you request a non-standard voltage from a charger, with the ability to set a current li…

DIY USB Charging The Right Way

Since the widespread adoption of USB 1.1 in the 90s, USB has become the de facto standard for connecting most peripherals to our everyday computers. The latest revision of the technology has been U…

Powering Up With USB: Untangling The USB Power Delivery Standards

Powering external devices directly from a PC’s I/O ports has been a thing long before USB was even a twinkle in an engineer’s eye. Some of us may remember the all too common PS/2 pass-t…