Thanks all - good discussion. In my case no plastic burning smells but definitely hot to the touch plastic casing in general under certain circumstances. Dave - that monoprice chart is good but also interesting that the Gauge of the cable seems to have little bearing on its rated amperage capacity. Is that implying maybe multiple wires are covering the difference? I.e. They have 32 AWG and 30 AWG for 3 amp cables, but also a 30 AWG 5 amp, and another that is 26 AWG 5 amp. (I did replace all of my ‘charging cables’ with Anker gear last year just to avoid worries for any higher power devices. Including USB-C cables in the car). On Wed, Feb 21, 2024 at 22:45 David Riley via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
On Feb 21, 2024, at 5:40 PM, Neil Cherry <ncherry@linuxha.com> wrote:
On 2/21/24 15:27, David Riley via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
On Feb 21, 2024, at 2:57 PM, John Heritage via vcf-midatlantic <
vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Other problem is your USB cables. You'll need the correct cable and the
USB C cables
are complex and *USUALLY* only work in one direction (correct resistors on one connector and not the other). I'm not an expert but this is one confusing protocol.
Don't even get me started on the cursed monstrosity that is USB-C. It's an absolute mess piled on top of a bigger mess that is the USB 1.1/2.0 specification (because it includes a USB-2 connection in its entirety).
Monoprice actually is very good about telling you what cables do what, because some cables do high power (it's a current rating thing, USB-C power distribution can negotiate the voltage from 5v to 20v or higher on newer specs, but the cable limits the current and some cables can't safely do 5A to get the full 100W), and the high power cables often don't have the high-speed pairs used to carry USB 3.x or DisplayPort or whatever so they can only do USB 2.0, and some do everything, but it can be hard to tell what's what.
Monoprice is always quite clear on what's what and has never sent me a bad cable and I've been using them for more than a decade. Amazon is more of a Wild West situation, especially with the multitude of vendors who aren't 100% honest (or sometimes just don't actually even bother to check) about what the cables do. Just take a look at the table toward the middle of the page here: https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=27923
- Dave