Related: When designing small electronics devices, my go to for plug-in power and simple data transmission (including serial-over-USB) is USB-C. It's small, reversible, and common due to phone chargers... and you can still wire it up and use it easily by just using the D+/- lines, power, and ground. (With appropriate CC resistors etc)
And the best part is that you don't even need a connector, you can just build it right into your PCB! USB-A also lets you do a PCB-only connector, but if you're doing anything that requires a cable instead of just plugging directly into a port, it's a lot more annoying to require a USB-A extension cable than any USB-C cable.
Do you have an example for such a "USB-C edge connector"? Intuitively I would have said that common PCB thickness is too large, or do I misunderstand what you mean?
Yeah, you need a 0.8mm thick PCB, but everyone can do that now (JLCPCB and oshpark both do it for the same price as a regular 1.6mm board). Here's a footprint: https://github.com/jmgao/PCB-USB-C
Annoyingly, the USB-C midplate is specified at 0.7mm. In my experience, 0.6mm boards are too thin to make a reliable connection. Going thicker has worked perfectly with all of the cables I've tried. I suppose there might be some risk of damaging your cables, but it doesn't seem too likely to me (the spec is 0.7 +/- 0.05), and I haven't had any problems.
I don’t understand, my new iPhone 13 came with a usb-c to lightning cable. My new iPad is usb-c too as well as my new kindle and new Sony camera. Even my vape has usb-c!
Older devices! And some new ones that still have USB-micro.
It's quite difficult to buy a USB-C cable that is not USB-C or Lightning on the other end. While USB-A on the charger's side with USB-C on device side is quite common and comes with a lot of devices that don't include a charger.
I couldn't find USB-C to USB-micro device cables at any retail store near me.
Ended up getting them off Amazon.
My transition to all USB-C is also much slower than it could be, since you can't get 6- or 10-port chargers that are all USB-C. iirc best I've seen is 2x USB-C and then 4 USB-A.
Use cases:
- my embedded dev boards are all USB-micro (sometimes 2x of) and worse, USB-mini or USB-B. setup for dev on the go from my MBP now is a foot-long USB-C to USB-micro.
There are super cheap usb-a to usb-c-female adapters, tiny little cable-less adapters. I heartily recommend buying in quantity, so your existing charging gear can all expose usb-c.
Then I buy usb-c to usb-c cables. And a usbc-to-usb-micro adapter, which comes with a little chain that clips on to the cable. I use less and less micro (the majority of my recent dev boards have been usbc for example) but having a cable good for both is super convenient & easy.
I'd be careful with these: USB-A male to USB-C female adapters are illegal in the specification because they let you connect two power sources together, which can lead to explosions.
I'm pretty sure you can easily do that with a presumably legal USB-A male to USB-C male cable.
Plug one end into a charger with a USB-A port (very common among phone chargers) and the other end into a charger with a USB-C port (Apple's chargers seem to be like this?).
> Plug one end into a charger with a USB-A port (very common among phone chargers) and the other end into a charger with a USB-C port (Apple's chargers seem to be like this?).
It's forbidden to make a charger like that unless it has a chip that actually speaks the protocol and does power negotiation properly. Same for anything that has a female USB-C port.
The trick is that USB-C has a pair of pins that identify what type of cable is connected. Different value resistors on the pins identify different types of cables, so the USB-C charger will know that the cable plugged into it is a legacy A to C cable, and not actually connect its VBUS.
Ok, so the iPhone 13 does come with a usb-c to lightning, but that cable is completely useless to me as it didn't come with a charger. All my previous iPhones and iPads came with a usb-a chargers.
Other than that Switch Charger I've got no other USB-c chargers.
