Seldom will you find a support team who can understand a technical hardware problem like this, and even more seldom will you find a company that responds to this with anything other than "nothing we can do, sorry". You're not going to get the "Wow, that is our bad, we'll retool our entire production line to account for that issue that nobody else complains about and send you one as soon as it's ready, thank you" that you so desire.
I was inspired by patio11's "Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You."[0] It changed the way I raise disputes with companies as a consumer, and it's gotten me good results.
The tl; dr is that large organizations have things they're afraid of, and they typically have processes in place to prevent them from happening. If you figure out what the company is afraid of, tie your grievance to that fear, and it will pressure the company to resolve your issue.
With credit reporting agencies, they're afraid of regulatory incidents. If you give signals that you're gathering evidence for a complaint to regulators, they'll work hard to resolve your issue. Other companies are afraid of a complaint to a distributor or the potential for a lawsuit. They're usually afraid of something, and if you can figure out what it is, you can get the attention of people with the power to resolve the issue.
[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-r...
I've seen cheap devices with USB ports --- but no logo. Probably for this very reason.
The real trick is trying to get the support guy to tell you what to do to get the right attention ... IF they know.
I used to do that all the time when I did big time networking gear support. "I, the support guy, can't just send you a new router (price like $200k+), that's just the policy, I gotta do X, Y, Z. That will take a bit of time and here is how that works ____ . But if you can get _____ to tell me to do it, I'll do it."
Now as a support guy you have to know the lay of the land before you deliver that line... but I was lucky enough to know and that org had good policies and so on.
What is AMAZING is some customers didn't realize that I just gave them the route they needed to go to get exactly what they wanted and they'd complain and whine. Like guys ... come on. I'd also tell them what to do to get closer to that goal faster without pulling strings, but that meant they had to do extra work, lotta folks didn't want to do that either.
Granted consumer support guy, probably has no tools / doesn't know the magic words / people and so on. Also probably afraid to tell you. Support personnel are most often "valued' for a short time but in reality are seen as a cost in most orgs and treated like garbage / scummy pawns. At one company I worked at the engineers would invite me over to their building when they had food catered. They knew we got jack squat (support almost never got food catered in), we had management who only knew how to prove their worth by penny pinching, and the engineers liked some of us / knew we saved them a lot of time.
Side story: I don't know if Amazon ever had human support but right now I've got something that shipped 3+ months ago and it is "On the way but running late" ... for 3+ months. In the past Amazon would just give me a refund outright... Now Amazon just sends me between two different bots that can't help me at all... The seller has a bunch of posts and feedback all the same, people not getting the product. Amazon bot don't care tells me to talk to the other bot. My review (almost the same as the other reviews now warning people about not getting product) was rejected.
There seem to be some sellers on Amazon that just don’t ship things until the customer complains.
I ran into this issue some months back. The unofficial-official policy seems to be to make you file a dispute with your CC stating that merchandise was not delivered. I was promptly refunded and haven’t had any issues conducting further business with Amazon.
That’s what the rep said they would do here.
And sadly that’s the most you can ask for.
A waste of time for both parties, because the author is wrong.
As Wikipedia helpfully points out: "The designation C refers only to the connector's physical configuration or form factor and should not be confused with the connector's specific capabilities"
From the write up it looks like he was able to get it working with the minimum 3A required by the cable spec. You don't actually have to support C-to-C cables if you choose to not to communicate with the e-marker.
> USB-C devices may optionally provide or consume bus power currents of 1.5 A and 3.0 A (at 5 V) in addition to baseline bus power provision; power sources can either advertise increased USB current through the configuration channel, or they can implement the full USB Power Delivery specification using both BMC-coded configuration line and legacy BFSK-coded VBUS line.
And further down:
> However, to connect a USB 2.0/1.1 device to a USB-C host, use of Rd[57] on the CC pins is required, as the source (host) will not supply VBUS until a connection is detected through the CC pins.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C
As the device doesn't implement the full USB PD specs, it must advertise that it wants power through the CC (configuration channel) pins. This is part of the specifications and it must be properly implemented.
I've had reasonable luck, honestly. Certainly not the majority of the time, but often enough to have some hope.
I've found that if I treat the support person decently -- as in, don't show my irritation and treat them as I'd prefer to be treated if I had their job -- and I demonstrate (not assert) that I've done my homework, know what I'm talking about, and am reasonable, I can get things escalated to someone who has the knowledge and power to address my concern.
I've even been put directly in touch with devs this way on occasion.
What I've learned is that most support people actually do want to get your issue resolved and don't want to spend all day with you. What you need to do is give them an acceptable (to their supervisors) reason to kick your issue to someone who can be more helpful. And don't be a dick. Nobody's going to go out of their way to help a dick.
Also, this reminds me a lot of the urban legend regarding Van Halen and Brown M&Ms with regard to their contract.[0] If they ignore the easy stuff that is hard for most to know, what other corners might they be cutting?
But they also are exactly like the old USB-micro devices with a different port and don’t charge on real USB-C. So to charge them I use a USB-C to USB-A port adapter so I can plug in a USB-A to USB-C cable.
It’s horrible.
I was kind of begging for a specific C-C cable that built in the resistors, specifically for these bad devices. It'd be incredibly easy to make, but what a dumb purpose in life. A 3 inch male-to-female adapter would be ideal, for all these jerk-wad devices.
I'm a bit perturbed but the very excellent power-monitoring AVHzY CT3 device I got recently automatically negotiates 5V, so at least when I go to plug in any of the various problematic devices, they work now. Alas it requires a second usb-c cable to work, plus the device, so it's cumbersome: that male-to-female usb-c 5v adapter would still be appreciated.
In the end, it feels like the real pressure the world needs is better reviewing. It'd be lovely to have a meta-site, that tells reviewers things they need to check for on each product. Slip ups like this should be a notable ding on everyone's name, but there's so many reviewers and so few actually know all the various things to look for. Some progress in solving the review meta-problem - enumerating all the concerns any device-type might have- would be greatly appreciated.
Both work perfectly on proper USB-C and charge. They were both $15 or less. The kind of device where every cent on the BoM may matter.
The devices in my original comment? Hundreds of dollars each. They have to go through certifications to prove they do what they say. The price of two resistors (they don’t need more power) is nothing compared to the MSRP which I already suspect has a lot of profit baked in.
There is no way to guess if a device charges right or not without finding the logo (which I guess could be a lie from an unscrupulous vendor) or finding reviews.
Presumably not cheap too and they do… that.
But two resistors? Nah.
I have a feeling this will go over poorly with their customers as USB-A stops being so common and suddenly the devices “won’t charge” when plugged into computers or common power bricks.
Eh, I don't know...
The author seems to assume the USB-IF is a good thing.
Having gone through the despicable $4,000 shakedown that is required to get a vendor id from the USB-IF, and implemented multiple devices against the outrages that are the specs, I dream about the remote possibility of living in a post-USB world someday.
Yes, I was around in the bad old days before USB...
In support of your point, this sentence, "I mean, the USB-C spec is really long, and probably very complicated thanks to the USB-IF committee" makes me think we probably agree more than disagree about the USB-IF.
I was probably reacting more to my own bitter experience with USB-C/3.xyz-it-even-has-electrolytes version(s).
It was relatively trivial to stand up a USB 2.x system.
USB 3.x with Type C connectors? Orders of magnitude more challenging throughout the stack. Even 99% of the Type-C connector hardware is bullshit.
I guess I'm empathizing with the opposite view that your title presents.
I truly don't care about _USB-C conformity_.
That said, I'd be embarrassed if my product that had a USB-C connector did not (at least slow) charge with a standard Type-C cable.
I'm just bitter and resentful about being forced to pay thousands of dollars for an artificially scarce number.
This also means the easiest DIY fix is the same as upgrading a device from microusb. Buy a connector with a small breakout board that has the correct resistors like this one[1]. Desolder the old connector, and solder the new one onto any convenient ground pads. Using the linked connector, it needs to be soldered upside-down but you can find a few different styles on aliexpress depending on what will fit in your device. You may need to insulate or scrape away some traces to avoid short circuits. Then solder small wires in place for V, ground, d+ and d-. There's always a nearby capacitor to solder to V, and nearby resistors to solder to d+ and d-.
[1]https://www.tindie.com/products/casualcoders/c-usb-type-c-br...
Maybe I should get/make a shim for this.. a USB-C female-to-male thing that just passes through everything but has a pulldown on CC.
Table 4-17 Precedence of power source usage https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/USB%20Type-C%20Spec%...
- Baseline: it behaves like a USB cable from 1996. Sync gets 100mA@5V (USB2) or 150mA@5V (USB3), and then as part of USB enumeration you can get up to 500mA@5V (USB2) or 900/1500mA@5V (USB3 single/dual lane) depending on what happens during USB enumeration.
Then, in priority order:
- USB PD: If both sides negotiate a USB PD contract, that overrides baseline, and you get up to 5A@20V (or more now with the new EPR stuff)
- USB Type-C current: The source drives a voltage on USB-C CC (pin only in USB-C cables) to say if it can give 1.5A@5V or 3A@5V, the sync pulls CC to say if it wants it (what the author is talking about here). If both sides have the right signaling, the source gives the current requested to the sync.
- USB BC 1.2: Intended for charging bricks; brick shorts the USB2 D+/D- together to signal device it gets up to 1.5A@5V. Or 2.4A@5V if you use Apple's extension (see, every iPad brick back in the day)
So, wonder if the USB-C to USB-A case in the article is just working because it's hooking up to a USB BC brick with that USB-C to USB-A cable, and the remote needs more than 100mA to charge and only supports the USB BC case?
Note only baseline is required to be compliant with the spec; there's no rule that the device has to use any of the other features.
Welcome to USB :)
The spec is specifically designed to allow this, because USB has backwards compatibility as a core tenant (i.e. you can plug in your USB keyboard from 1996 and it will probably still work). Also a USB-C to micro USB-B cable or USB-C to USB-A cable is explicitly allowed in the spec, and how could such a thing possibly work if the spec somehow required using the new CC pins instead of making them optional, since those pins are not in USB-A/USB-B?
Still, not the nicest experience for users :(
Otherwise go to a real manufacturer like monoprice or a smaller company that specializes in cable. They will usually work well.
You can’t get good cables for aliamazon bargain prices unless you go used/open box or similar.
I wanted some thin and various length hdmi cables, Amazon sold me garbage (no surprise these days). Went to monoprice and they were cheaper than Amazon and they worked. Not basement prices like some places... but I don't have a problem paying for reliability.
Monoprice does not manufacture anything. Also, a lot of the apple USB-C cables are power only.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B093YVRHMB
- USB C/USB A on one end
- USB C/Lightning/micro USB on the other end
- 10 GB/s data
- supports video over USB C (I have a portable external display that gets power and video over USB C)
- 100W charging
- USB 3.1
> I've gotten burned by Amazon too many times to trust.
Also, a lot of the reviews are really bad, everything from poor construction to not being flexible enough to the connectors not fitting.
If you don't see USB PD (Power Delivery) on it, chances are it won't work with your usual chargers. Even with PD on it, it can be hit or miss, but at least at an 80% success rate vs 0% without it.
So you end up needing a 48MHz Cortex-M0 microcontroller just to do the god damned power delivery. At least, I've never seen it done by a less capable part. And processors of that class are, alas, just not that cheap.
I just wondered if some hypothesized USB-C consortium decided to "patent" how the signals work, and charge $ for compliance/conformance to the chipset for a logo badging and green tick.
It's more usual higher up the complexity food chain like MP4 decoding. Frauenhoffer wants its IPR respected. Philips made coin on conformance to the audio cassette form factor. Somebody made book with CD-ROM size, encoding. It's normal.
You said it's because they don't care about the bigger picture. But the bigger picture is they are doing everything to cut cost and adding extra chips is not worth it. They aren't exactly hailed for their built quality.
I highly doubt this was done for cost reasons, even including the additional assembly costs, which for surface mount resistors would be very low. This feels like a design error, and I doubt the support emails went anywhere meaningful.
[0]: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/chip-resistor-sur...
I imagine they got the cheapest engineer to make a functioning product. Changing their whole production line for a $0.001 component is hardly worth their time in this product segment, however debatable the ethics or PR of it is.
For some weird reason it cannot charge if you plug the other end of the USB-C cord to a Apple made charger. It works with all other USB-C wall bricks.
Never understood what that was about
The European Union would like to have a word with you....
With teeth.
You may or may not be surprised, but other people have different mixes of tech. I'm past the halfway point in A to C, it's more troublesome now to find an open A port or cable than the other way around.
If you excuse bad behavior by companies, they'll gladly take advantage of that. Letting them blame the spec is foolish. It's not _that_ hard to get at least the basics right. Many do it fine.
