Nintendo Switch is not USB-C compliant (opens in new tab)

>EEs who can actually read a damn spec sheet properly...

I think this is the hardware equivalent of expecting programmers to write bug free code on the first try.

Most of the time when a programmer wants to implement something a little complex and a little outside their expertise, they use an external library. Likewise, EEs will often buy a chip produced by a third party manufacturer and use that to handle it. But the abstractions available to EEs are often a bit more leaky than those available to us programmers, since they are more constrained by the laws of physics. and as a result that third party chip is still harder to use than a software library.

Is it really that simple? Just changing a resistor value? I got an XPS 13 for work, it’s all USB-C, and the versatility of the port is fantastic (doesn’t matter which port I plug into, it still charges, so I don’t have to wrap the power cable around the back of the machine or sit in a weird position to keep some slack in the wire). However, I took it to the office and naturally I plugged my power adapter into one port. I then plugged in the monitor (also USB-C, delivering power), and the two ports cancelled themselves out and confused the OS. Windows thought I was charging the laptop yet it also said the battery was depleting. They were negating each other and the battery loss continued as it would with no power connected.

It makes sense for a monitor to power the laptop because it’s mains connected. But then you have one of those classic programming problems: if there are multiple inputs providing the same thing which do you consider the source of truth?

This was the case when the original USB came out first too. It took a good couple of years to mature. I think these are normal standardization issues...

It must be more than "engineers can't read a spec" because decices using previous versions of USB tend to be fine. So why can engineers read those specs? (Why didn't they "choose an incorrect resistor value" for previous generations of USB, then?)

This spec by contrast must be far more complicated[1]; also since it is so much faster, can't quality components supporting it all be more expensive - leading to cutting corners as a cost cutting feature?

Also if as a consumer you can't predict what "should" be about to happen (which way power will flow, what will be host) that is down to a bad spec re connector types. For example couldn't a universal visual indicator on a port (including the bottom of a phone) indicate its capabilities and what will happen very clearly? (Through symbols.) They do not. Couldn't a software popup make you choose? They do not.

Not to mention that it is not clear what should happen. If a phone can power a USB peripheral (like usb on the go) that means it could charge a second phone.

So if you connect two phones which one should charge the other? With old versions of USB phones the answer is simple: whichever one you put an on the go converter into, making it a master instead of a phone's usual role as a slave.

The fact that the spec does not make these as clear for USB C is down to the spec and design.

Can't USV C simply be badly designed? (overdesigned, underdesigned, badly designed.)

[1] Consider that a 1-page spec that can be read and implemented quickly in 15 minutes, can be implemented by anyone. A five-thousand page spec that takes 1,000 hours to read and understand can be implemented by no one (only teams). In between we have both previous versions of USB and USB C - but is it possible that USB C is too far in the latter direction?

Is it just a resistor, or is it one of hundreds of possible resistor depending on factor X? USB or any connection should be simple - you know, like code. The more exceptions and options you add, the harder it becomes to properly implement it. This is exponential, too, not linear.

A sane USB-C spec would not have required a resistor for an A-to-C cable.

It's cost cutting to make cheaper cables and ports.

This. I’m always completely bemused when I first connect a USB-C charger to a USB-C battery pack before plugging into the wall - the LED on the charger lights up like the battery is powering the charger.

There’s also tons of times where the device you want to power from the battery starts charging the battery instead. With both ends of the connector being identical I’m not sure there even is a _good_ way to fix this that ordinary consumers will understand, the better solution might have been to still keep different cable ends. I hope this mess eventually gets better.

Wonder if you could do it on the cable with little embedded LED lights. One end turns red for "charging" the other turns blue for "supplying power". Would add to the BOM cost on the cable for sure, but it would not only be cool looking but rather useful.

The simplest solutions are directional cables (remember directional HDMI cables?) or plug-in order (supplier first, receiver last).

Well, the problem is that you can't patent Ethernet anymore so they have to complexify it. I'm being a bit snarky, but if you look at practically all the modern standards (HDMI, Thunderbolt, UCB-C), they are basically 2-TX and 2-RX pairs like Ethernet.

The core problem with power is that you can't really pump laptop charge wattage down a USB cable without raising the voltage above 5V. Once you accept that, the engineering gets quite a bit more complicated and you have to negotiate so one side doesn't blow the other up.

> You can have a USB 2.0, USB 3.0, USB 3.1, Power-only, Display-only, Thunderbolt-3-only "usb-c" cables that all look identical outside yet won't work for your use case.

Half of those are not spec-compliant. There are only 4 different legitimate types of cable: 3.0 non-power/thunderbolt, 3.1 non-power/thunderbolt, power-capable non-thunderbolt, and thunderbolt. That's 3 more types than there should be, but let's not make the problem worse than it is.

I think this error is caused by a mismatch between the monitors capacity to deliver power and your Macbooks desire for it. The HP Envy 27 is rated to deliver 65W, but MBPs want 85W. The MBP will negotiate down to 65W (although the battery may discharge under heavy usage).

I could be wrong though. I've got a similar setup and I've only seen the error once or twice.

My macbook won't wake up my usb-c monitors consistently. I have tried 8 cables at this point. I have to unplug the cable and plug it back in.

I also refuses to mount my phone straight usb-c, and the known workaround is to go usbc -> a -> c.

At this point in my relationship with Apple, I can only assume this is deliberate.

What they meant is that you should use an official HP Envy laptop :)

Different classes of failure though. Older USB ports would just fail to work (in the majority of cases), whereas with USB-C there is the risk of damaging the device.

That is a different Kettle of fish.

First of all, Apple came up with a slightly different set of resistors on the data pins (leaning that the data in and data out will read slightly different V) to signal to their devices that they could go above 1A draw while charging.

The official charging spec says to put a resistor between the data pins (inside the charger to support detachable USB cables), or simply to short them with a blob of solder.

Your JBL speakers are likely reacting as if it was plugged into a normal USB port.

also keep in mind that the charging spec came about as China and EU wanted to deal with the piles of incompatible chargers that was going into landfills.

Thus older USB ports max out at 5V 0.5A, as that was the spec back when USB 1.0 was launched. Also why some external HDDs come with a Y cable that draws power from two USB ports to get the motor spinning.

what you're describing is simply that those ports were not designed to deliver a lot of amps because usb devices at that time did not need it. i dont think it's the same as not being fully spec compliant at the protocol level. i've never had 2 usb 2.0 devices refuse to work together.

The Switch has many logos on it, but a USB-C logo is not one of them. Nintendo does not use the term "USB-C" in its literature for the Switch.

Are you sure it has a USB-C logo?

My guess is that if they make their own shape, then third party accessories with that shape are guaranteed to work. Since they use USB-C, then there is fear, uncertainty and doubt by the consumer about if an accessory will work or not.

i bought a simple USB Type-C to HDMI adapter and used it successfully a few times. of course, now that people's switches are getting bricked, i'm scared to keep using it. :(

What voltage is the 100W coming through at? If it is low voltage, that is gonna be a really beefy cable... At 12V that is more than 8 amps. 5v is 20 amps. That is a lot of current to send over a typical USB cable...

What people usually refer to as USB-C are 3 independent specs.

First there is the C plug and cable, including provisions for converting between C and the various A and B sizes. This is the spec that introduce various resistors to signal if the cable is a converter or (a very big or that has created much problems) if it can handle various watts at 5V.

then there is the power delivery spec that on paper can be used with any USB plug (yes, even your old A and B formats), and allows current to go in either direction at up to 20V.

And thirdly there is a continuation of the 3.0 data spec, 3.1, that include a provision for using various wires in the C cable in an alternate mode. This mode allows anything from digital video to PCI bus traffic to travel over the same cable, if both ends support the protocol traveling over the alternate mode wires. outside of alternate mode the 3.1 data spec can also be used with 3.0 A and B ports.

So even if your device have a C port, it may not be able to handle more than 5V at 0.5A and 1.0 data speeds...

More that cheap it was convenient: You solve the whole power, video output and external devices problem with a single chip on both side. And it also look nice compared to any usual docking port.

It solved enough design issues for them to let go their old habit of having proprietary connectors for charging. Which made them a lot of money.

or not pay to use the port shape but pay to certify the port, which is most often the case in the compatibility industry and adds a useful service...

They should stop using HDMI and switch to DisplayPort.

Make popular and cheaply available ($1 - $3) a simple device that can plug into a port and pound the device through all the modes, blowing it up in spectacular fashion if it's not compliant. Make them ubiquitous enough that mischievous sorts are prone to quickly destroy any device put on the market with flawed ports.

Note: There is probably an ethical issue with this, but it doesn't jump out at me.

Out of curiosity which standards? The only one I can think of is providing a slightly higher voltage (but still within USB-C spec) to account for resistive losses in the cable. That's why it says 61 watts instead of 60.

Can you say more? Thanks.

People are somewhat mad, but Nintendo's only recently bothered adopting anything akin to industry standards around power adaptors. Even the 3DS is proprietary, and the Switch dock itself is some voodoo magic with a chip inside.

USB C itself has been sort of a minefield of adaptors getting the spec wrong, so I doubt anyone is surprised that docks are buggy and even capable of damaging parts.

Cheers, presumably the AC wall plugs have international equivalents for the non-US market?

(i.e. their 'compliance' has been tested on 240V scenarios)

Also, every other console may not have an official "Seal", but they all have the same process. Nintendo created that idea when anyone could release games for consoles without the console manufacturer approving or even knowing about it. I can't just make an Xbox 1 game and release it legally either. Blaming this on the Seal is completely misunderstanding the context.

I remember reading a long article on how Nintendo brought back video games. According to the article, they deeply analyzed the early '80s crash to determine what went wrong, so they could avoid whatever caused that.

The article said that their conclusion was that they main factor was the proliferation of a large number of low quality games from numerous third party publishers. This was a time when most people's only source of game reviews was magazines or person experience of friends. So a lot of games were bought blind, based just on the claims on the box. After people got burned on a couple low quality games or so, which cost about as much in today's money as today's games, they often stopped or greatly reduced their game buying. Hence, Nintendo decided that they had to control who could publish for their console.

Speaking as someone who was programming games for the Mattel Intellivision at the time of the crash, and got laid off because of it, Nintendo's analysis seems quite plausible to me [1].

Consider Intellivision games. The history for the other consoles is similar, but I know Intellivision best so that is what I will use.

Once upon a time, the only people who could write Intellivision games were engineers from APh. APh was/is an engineering consulting firm in Pasadena, CA, which was founded by and largely staffed by former and current Caltech students. APh designed the bulk of the electronics for the Intellivision, and more importantly wrote the ROM and the early games.

Not too long after that, the set of people who could write Intellivision games expanded to include Mattel engineers.

Games written at APh or Mattel could take full advantage of the ROM, which provided a lot of tools to make writing games easier. If you did not use the ROM you had to write a lot more code, know a lot more about low level hardware details, and you might need to use a bigger cartridge which could raise your costs significantly. (For example, the ROM provided high level sprite [2] handling. You could just give it a list of images, and tell it to animate the sprite with them at a specified rate. You could tell it to give the sprite a velocity and it would deal with moving it. You could give it callback routines for various types of collisions, such as sprite hits sprite or sprite hits background, or sprite hits edge).

The set of Intellivision game writers further expanded when people who had been Intellivision developers at Mattel or APh started leaving to form their own companies. Several key APh Intellivision people formed Chesire Engineering, which wrote Intellivision games for Activision. Imagic was formed by former Atari and Mattel people.

These companies had people who had used the Intellivision ROM. They couldn't take the documentation with them when they left, but they could direct a clean room reverse engineering effort to produce their own documentation sufficient to train new programmers in how to use it. So those companies could produce top quality Intellivision games, too.

But then companies start coming on the scene that did not have any ex-Mattel or ex-APh people, or anyone from Imagic or other places that had their own documentation on the ROM. These companies most likely started with the hardware documentation (both the CPU and the graphics system in the Intellivision were off the shelf General Instruments parts), and then reverse engineered just the boot code from the ROM to figure out what it expected to find in a cartridge. Then they handled everything themselves. This made it quite a bit harder to do a top tier game.

There were also console makers who wrote games for competing consoles. Mattel did games for Atari and Coleco consoles. Coleco did games for Mattel and Atari consoles. I don't remember Atari doing games for other consoles, but Wikipedia claims they did Centipede and Defender for Intellivision and Colecovision, and Pac-Man for Intellivision and Galaxian for Colecovision. The console makers, unlike the small, poorly funded companies from the above paragraph, had the resources to properly reverse engineer the ROMs of other consoles and then use them in their games.

A very large fraction of the games from this last group of companies were pretty bad. They were often rushed, because these companies were often not well funded--they had to get their game done and out fast. That also meant they could not get review copies to magazines with enough lead time for the reviews to come out before or concurrent with the game's release. The market went downhill rapidly at that point.

Anyway, I find it quite plausible that if the industry had stayed with each console only having games written by its own associated developers, the competing console makers, and a couple big third parties (Imagic and Activision), the crash could have been avoided.

[1] Actually, at the time, I was programming for what would have been the next generation Intellivision, which at that point was just a big box containing the CPU and a prototype of the next generation Intellivision graphics chip implemented as several wire-wrapped circuit boards full of 74xx or equivalent discrete logic chips. We could leave work at night, get back in the morning, and find that the hardware people had pulled an all-nighter and changed the design of the graphics, massively breaking all our code...except for Hal Finney's code which always managed to just take a few tweaks to fix no matter how radical the hardware change.

[2] They were actually called "moving objects", not "sprites", in all the Intellivision documentation and code, but I'm going to use sprites because this is what nearly everyone else calls hardware moving objects.

That's 79 dollars. I said cheap :) 20 bucks is realistic, even if it's just the hardware and needs a phone or even a laptop to be plugged into. Even a laptop is reasonable.

I’ve been looking for soil moisture sensors for months and never come across that site, just on the first page of IOT stuff there are 5 good options on Tindie.

Amazing, thanks.

More info on that here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/86wu9t/psa_...

Both the update and third party accessories seem implicated to a degree.

USB-PD is still allowed on classic USB-A/B ports