That actually is pretty cool.
making a flippable connecter with this many pins is honestly not easy. Especially considering how many different protocols it supports.
USB has been plagued by many weird decisions and scope creep but I really hope USB-C puts an end to that. A fully wired cable contains enough twisted pairs for just about any application and the physical properties are great. Too bad manufacturers will keep creating non-compliant devices such as naïve hubs that don’t account for PD voltage mismatch, or cables/chargers that claim to do something and actually don’t, making it a coin toss as to what devices they work with.
They have some engineer working on how to cram fiber into that thing, I can almost guarantee it.
Why would a hub request a voltage it doesn’t support? I assume the usb port should output 5v unless a different voltage is requested explicitly.
And how small it is, and that it can take 240W.
And fuckin 4K video in parallel to usb connections.
wtf I love usb-c
The colors were chosen by somebody at Microchip but this has become the go-to picture for USB-C pinout. Here’s the original PDF and here’s a one-page vector version I made, you can print it as a poster:
What is D and why is there no second pair in the plug?
DATA, it’s legacy (1.0-2.0) USB’s differential pair for backwards compatibility. You only need one side to make contact so they decided to simplify plugs for devices that use the legacy mode. For example most mice and keyboards, even ones with USB-C, still use USB 1.1 because they don’t need the extra speed, and 1.1 cables are cheaper because the low speed allows them to be unshielded and still not suffer much interference.
Thank you!