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My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

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Re: My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

#11

Post by londons_explore »

9v or 12v over USB-A is reasonably common here in Asia... You always need to check the voltage rating before randomly plugging stuff in if it isn't from a big manufacturer.

For example, the handwarmers I'm using right now are USB-A at 12 volts, but have a dial to adjust the voltage up and down between 0 volts and 12 volts to adjust the temperature (I think it's actually PWM on the 12v power lines, but haven't actually checked).

5.5V or 6V is also common because it lets you use thin cheap wires which remove about a volt and still can fast charge phones (which tend to be picky and will drop back to 500mA charging if the voltage droops).

Big manufacturers also use non-5V over USB sometimes, but you need to send a special message to enable higher voltages, so it's safe to plug them into anything. Still troublesome if you're using a USB Y-splitter or multi-headeded cable.

Re: My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

#14

Post by londons_explore »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #3

I have the same fountains and I have already roasted an iPad charger on it fountain (I used the charger because it had possibility to connect cable to it instead of plugin directly to the socket). One day it just went out and burnt a little. From that time I tend to use the provided one, but I never noticed it provides a different voltage. Thanks for the warning

An official Apple iPad charger wouldn't fail in this case - it has protection against basically anything on the output side - from short circuits to big back-EMF spikes.

3rd party ones on the other hand....

Re: My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

#15

Post by lxgr »

bArray wrote: post #6

To be completely fair, those power banks should have a diode (or some protection circuitry) to prevent their damage. A loose cable could easily put higher voltage on the port than 5.25V. That said, what an awful USB port to come across. A little reading wouldn't have gone amiss though. My natural reaction would have been to assume it was an output, not an input.

A diode doesn’t protect from over-voltage; that requires more complicated circuitry as far as I understand.

And how would a loose cable cause a voltage spike?

Re: My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

#16

Post by [deleted] »

denotational wrote: post #2

This is the sort of thing that almost (but not quite) pushes me to support mandatory certification (enforced by patents/other IP protections) for consumer devices that use a familiar connector like USB. Consumers shouldn’t need to worry about the specific output voltage; the presence of a USB-A connector should indicate that it abides by the specification. The hacker in me hates the idea of enforcing something like t…

[deleted]

Re: My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

#17

Post by wiredfool »

denotational wrote: post #2

This is the sort of thing that almost (but not quite) pushes me to support mandatory certification (enforced by patents/other IP protections) for consumer devices that use a familiar connector like USB. Consumers shouldn’t need to worry about the specific output voltage; the presence of a USB-A connector should indicate that it abides by the specification. The hacker in me hates the idea of enforcing something like t…

It's got a CE mark, but it's unclear if it's valid or not. This is a mandatory certification in the EU, like the UL listing in the US.

The device is specifying the output voltage, which isn't in spec for the connector, but it is (apparently) accurate.

Re: My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

#18

Post by thriftwy »

denotational wrote: post #2

This is the sort of thing that almost (but not quite) pushes me to support mandatory certification (enforced by patents/other IP protections) for consumer devices that use a familiar connector like USB. Consumers shouldn’t need to worry about the specific output voltage; the presence of a USB-A connector should indicate that it abides by the specification. The hacker in me hates the idea of enforcing something like t…

Why not have efficient law and just sue large sums out of misbehaving manufacturers? Then you no longer punish the innocent.

Re: My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

#19

Post by mciancia »

kccqzy wrote: post #7

I recently found a Huawei-branded power bank that outputs 9V over USB-A. See https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000209696496.html and look at the label on the seventh picture. EDIT: I may be wrong. Apparently this is now allowed by the Quick Charge spec. See comments below.

That might be within some quickcharge specs and it won't output 9v by default

Re: My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

#20

Post by PetitPrince »

syx wrote: post #5

I noticed something similar to this on my Insta360 ONE X charger. Initially I thought I could just use any USB power adapter but after many tries it turned out that the vendor implemented their own voltage on their charger sold separately. Quite a disappointment as charger broke after two years.

For what it's worth, I can charge my X3 (same camera, two generations later) with all the USB-C charger I tried (laptop charger, phone charger, car adapter). USB-C helps, I guess (One X is micro-usb).
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