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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

#231

Post by sokoloff »

anotherboffin wrote: post #226
s1artibartfast wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and they will respond with "We sincerely thank you for your concern. We have a 6 month email retention policy in place to address your issue"

Hypothetically, and just out of curiosity: if mint2 were to keep this email and it would be included as part of the evidence in a lawsuit, how would this bode for Lidl?

Assuming it wasn't mint2 that had the fire, it would almost surely go undetected in discovery. (Lidl would say "as required, we've searched for and provided all emails and care contacts referencing USB chargers".)

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

#232

Post by hddherman »

palemoonale wrote: post #227
npteljes wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the point is that the charger has a standard USB-A socket, but delivers nonstandard charge. This is potentially dangerous, as the function of the charger does not match the user expectation.

Nope, the point is that he thought to fancy / easy up life with more tech (mentioned potential health issues my ass, you have to clean up every day anyway after pets - does he thin a fountain does not build up residue and germs?), and promptly got more issues to solve. One is the non-standard voltage output, another is spoiled cats which can't be arsed to drink from a peasant's bowl (knew about such habits before, ex…

Hi, author here.

Usually I'd agree with you here, people use tech in places where it shouldn't be used quite often, but in this case I do not mind it at all. If this helps avoid future visits to the vet (and so far it has worked), then it's OK in my book.

And yes, you do have to clean it regularly and change the filters, we're already doing that.

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

#233

Post by Johnny555 »

fishbacon wrote: post #22

I am concerned that there are no pictures of the adorable cats in the post. It sound like the manufacturers just see USB-A as a convenient and cheap connector for delivering power.

>It sound like the manufacturers just see USB-A as a convenient and cheap connector for delivering power.

Is it really any cheaper than a simple barrel connector that manufacturers have used forever for power?

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

#234

Post by emerongi »

walthamstow wrote: post #55
hddherman wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, author here, I've fixed that in the post now.

Great news! By the way, are you Finnish? I've never seen an 'O with tilde' character before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%95

It's a pretty rare character indeed.

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

#235

Post by npteljes »

palemoonale wrote: post #227
npteljes wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the point is that the charger has a standard USB-A socket, but delivers nonstandard charge. This is potentially dangerous, as the function of the charger does not match the user expectation.

Nope, the point is that he thought to fancy / easy up life with more tech (mentioned potential health issues my ass, you have to clean up every day anyway after pets - does he thin a fountain does not build up residue and germs?), and promptly got more issues to solve. One is the non-standard voltage output, another is spoiled cats which can't be arsed to drink from a peasant's bowl (knew about such habits before, ex…

No, that's not the point. The point is to illustrate that products defy expectations with regards to the U in USB, which is for Universal. The rest of the article is context for the point, not the point itself.

Reason 1 supporting this: the article's title is "My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter". What sticks out most here is the word spicy, and when used in conjunction with electricity, it usually means more electricity than needed. Very good title.

Reason 2 supporting this: The heading is "It turns out that you can’t trust any USB type A power adapter to be within spec". Nothing about cat fountains.

Reason 3 supporting this: the article is tagged with the "ramblings" tag, setting us up that the article will be opinionated, and not strictly just about the central point of it.

>Stop trying to 'improve' life by more & more tech-based BS.

Hard disagree. There's no clear healthy cutoff with regards to technology, and the frame of reference also changes over time (and the course of history). Our life is supported by a ton of technology, many pieces of it being thought about as both "too much" and "not good enough".

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

#236

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

moffkalast wrote: post #188
npteljes wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barrel plugs are not better technically, but it would be better to use them with random voltages because people don't assume that they conform to a standard. With barrel plugs, the customer expectation is that every device has its own charger, and that's that. With USB, the assumption is that they are all compatible.

With barrel plugs the likelyhood that one of your devices will have one that fits into another is basically zero too.

Barrel connectors come in standard sizes and usually have the voltage rating on the device.

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

#237

Post by ronsor »

anonu wrote: post #38
lxgr wrote: post #28

This actually makes me quite happy that most stuff does not come with a wall adapter anymore these days, but only with a USB plug. There are much worse things than 7V that a bad adapter can output. One of the scariest failure modes I’ve recently learned about is a supply that still provides 5V between both pins – but 225V and 230V to ground, respectively…

> respectively not sure I follow you. can you clarify what you mean by both 225v and 230v to ground? You are measuring the potential between ground and USB output?

Surely this is a violation of the specifications?

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

#238

Post by dylan604 »

lxgr wrote: post #126
dylan604 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's turned off or it is on and not being used, probably not much. But more and more equipment no longer has an off mode and is more of an idle stand-by mode, so current is still always being used by part of the system. The point is that in electricity delivery, it is normal to have deviations in the voltage as acceptable. Most power supplies have tolerances that can handle these deviations. A dip is something out…

Ah, so e.g. something like a device flipping between “powered” and “not powered” states, which then wears out some part that doesn’t expect that state change to happen so often?

no, not quite. a dip is some lower than the accepted deviations from the expected value. if you have an accepted range of +/-10%, but the dip causes the voltage to drop 15%, that's a dip. some places define an outage as being less than 5% of expected value. so somewhere before outage, you have a severe undervolt situation where the equipment struggles. the longer the dip lasts, the worse things can get.

one of the shops that I worked at suffered a catastrophic situation when a nearby construction crew cut one phase of the 3-phase power coming into our facility. the poor transformer died, and took out the some of the more delicate PSUs attached to some very expensive equipment. we were down for weeks recovering from that.

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

#239

Post by coverclock »

I too have tried to use a USB power bank as a kind of DIY UPS to power a Raspberry Pi SBC. What I learned - which may be unrelated to your experience - is that all of the several power banks I tried can be either charging, or powering a device, but not both at the same time. So my Raspberry Pi would run until the power bank got low, then the power bank would cut power to the Pi and charge itself, then power the Raspberry Pi up again. I had to buy a power bank specifically advertised as a USB UPS; that worked fine. The normal power bank seems to be designed to charge a battery powered device like a mobile phone (whose own battery can be thought of as a kind of UPS for the device), but not a device that requires continuous power (like the Pi).

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

#240

Post by sleepybrett »

sleepybrett wrote: post #217
rollcat wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While Nintendo's software implementation of USB-PD was flawed in some ways, it didn't cause this problem. I stand corrected. The dock however, still rejects non-Nintendo chargers. I have an MBP, a Thinkpad, an iPad, and a Switch - every device works with each other's (and third-party) chargers, except the Switch, when docked.

I think these usb-c pd (and other) issues were corrected in the oled switches and the docks that come with them but the fixes might not have been total. This comment, specifically about some of the technical details of the video out stuff points to at least some changes were done in the new generation: https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/171c3mj/comme... Someone can correct me on this as well. I've noticed…

Turns out I seem to be right about the negotiation: https://acroname.com/sites/default/files/shared/blog-basic-p...
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