91–100 of 146 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That makes sense from the consumer's point of view. But imagine you're a manufacturer, producing USB device controller chips by the million. Would you really be willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to protect against a failure mode that can only happen due to some other company's extreme negligence?
Tens of thousands of dollars total is far less than it costs a company just to moot the question.
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I'm saying a crowbar isn't a diode, and you're saying that you should call a crowbar a crowbar? Color me confused. Usually a crowbar is a circuit with a triac or SCR in it designed to protect against overvoltage. This isn't about frayed cables. Frayed cables don't do this. This is about a cable which is wired the opposite of the way it should be. A minimal protection circuit is probably going to cost around $0.20 in…
Crowbar is a general concept - a short across a supply. A diode across the rails acts as such, so I referred to it as a crowbar. I'm familiar with SCR-based active crowbar circuits - what we're disagreeing about is narrow-prescriptive versus wide-descriptive usage of a term. Most frayed cables are going to simply short or open, but the right combination of such would cross wires. But sure, they're going to be rare. O…
There's an art to designing something to last for no longer than it has to, and to use not a single part that isn't necessary. How much worse would our lives be if we had to pay industrial/commercial prices for all of our goods?
I wonder if this one cable was miswired or it's something consistently wrong with the product. Either way that something like that could make it out of the factory demonstrates terrible or no QA/QC. I've never used the Twinkie but it looks pretty cool. This shows that it may be worth adding some simple protection to the circuit to prevent simple miswires from damaging it or the host PC.
>I wonder if this one cable was miswired or it's something consistently wrong with the product. He bought more to find out: https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung/posts/EBGMagC46fN
I don't think so. From TFP:
"Here are some pictures of the torn down SurjTech 3M cable that fried my Pixel."
Cable, singular. :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Crowbar is a general concept - a short across a supply. A diode across the rails acts as such, so I referred to it as a crowbar. I'm familiar with SCR-based active crowbar circuits - what we're disagreeing about is narrow-prescriptive versus wide-descriptive usage of a term. Most frayed cables are going to simply short or open, but the right combination of such would cross wires. But sure, they're going to be rare. O…
Ugh. Am I the only one who appreciates cheap things for what they are? Over-engineering something is a bad thing, just as under-engineering it is too. It makes things more expensive than they have to be. There's an art to designing something to last for no longer than it has to, and to use not a single part that isn't necessary. How much worse would our lives be if we had to pay industrial/commercial prices for all o…
Consumer electronics are -generally- ridiculously cheap these days. I welcome more "overengineering", even if it drives up the cost somewhat. :)
My biggest surprise here is there is still people using Google+.
Honestly G+ is amazing for technical discussion. Examples from my feed: https://plus.google.com/+KentonVarda/posts/cFsgVBuXinb https://plus.google.com/+KentonVarda/posts/JDwHfAiLGNQ At least in my experience, FB and Twitter simply don't produce anything like that.
If and only if you're okay with the horribly limited formatting that Plus offers. There's no way in hell you can ever post code snippets, for example.
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the usb ports on macs are supposed to have overcurrent protection. You actually get a dialog popup in the OS when it happens. I know because I've triggered it doing something with an arduino.
USB overcurrent protection is pretty sophisticated. Devices get 100 mA for free, then have to ask the host for more current. Well, it's a bit more complex nowadays, but that's the basics.
Interesting that most of the reviews for Anker and Aukey products on Amazon have a variation of the same "I was provided with a free sample of this product in exchange for my unbiased professional review."
Ethical journalists can attempt to ignore the impact of gratis equipment, but it's difficult in the best of situations. Just as difficult as trying to ignore the impact of a "helpful" PR department. Apple was particularly good at this; I was provided with every version of the iPad for reviews. Once Apple got over their death march, this dried up, and dealing with their PR firm became tedious. HP provided notebooks, PDAs, anything, with no expectation or real system for returning equipment. The only vendors I ever dealt with that were strict about returns were Kodak/Canon with their DSLRs and lenses. These were normally around $10K or greater, so I was not surprised at all.
Bias is implicit in any review where the publication isn't purchasing the items it reviews. I'm not sure how Sweethome and the Wirecutter work, though I know they make $$ off of purchase referrals through Amazon.
If you buy a power strip, even a cheap one, you at least get some assurance that it is UL rated and probably won't burn your house down. USB isn't just a keyboard connector anymore... We should have some assurance that cables are legit and safe.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ugh. Am I the only one who appreciates cheap things for what they are? Over-engineering something is a bad thing, just as under-engineering it is too. It makes things more expensive than they have to be. There's an art to designing something to last for no longer than it has to, and to use not a single part that isn't necessary. How much worse would our lives be if we had to pay industrial/commercial prices for all o…
> It makes things more expensive than they have to be. Consumer electronics are -generally- ridiculously cheap these days. I welcome more "overengineering", even if it drives up the cost somewhat. :)
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Sure, but the magnitude of that cost matters a lot. You were saying a dollar or two in raw materials to protect against 100W, now you're saying three or four cents. A few cents to protect hundreds of dollars in equipment from electrical faults seems worthwhile to me.
Sorry I was not clear in my comments. The dollar solution is for some type of crowbar circuit. This is the most robust solution. The 3-4 cents is for specifically, reverse polarity protection when somehow, a -5V differential is applied to device power inputs. This cheaper solution only narrowly addresses this particular power fault, and no others.
Do I assume correctly that a fuse for overcurrent protection wont act quickly enough to save the hardware in the event of reverse polarity?