Comment by foxfluff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by foxfluff | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there's bigger fish to fry. There's more and more li-ion appliances and tools, most with proprietary chargers (think all the power tools), and in many cases no user replaceable battery packs (e.g. vacuum cleaners).

It really sucks that I need a new charger + battery if I want to use some bosch or dewalt tool instead of a ryobi or whatever I happen to have. And I can't use these tools' batteries to power USB devices..

I'm sure all these electric vacuum cleaners are a big lump of e-waste when the battery inevitably dies.

Phones have standardized pretty well. Apple is an outlier but I don't think that's a huge deal, and the cost of forcing them (and their users) to switch may be worse than the status quo.

USB-C can supply up to 100W, so there's no reason it can't be used for the bulk of those use cases too.

USB-C 2.1 will be able to carry 240W with supported cables.

I think that's a lot harder problem, since there's a wide variety of needs that general batteries will have, vs smartphone chargers (and not even smartphone batteries)

There are some hard parts (e.g. I don't expect mechanical compatibility across appliances anytime soon) and easy parts (charging). There's really nothing fancy about the chargers that all the appliances use.

USB PD isn't designed for smartphone batteries, it can power lots of things, including laptops, monitors, soldering irons, large power banks. Appliances' batteries are hardly any different from a power bank. There is no "battery smarts" in the charger itself, it just gives juice to a charge controller located by the battery. I don't know if it scales enough to be usable for 48V appliances, but a lot of stuff could be powered by a common interface (and, conversely, most large batteries could easily double as a power bank, and they indeed do if you just attach the right electronics downstream of it; having this built-in would be an interesting step).

With the new usb-c pd standard 48V is possible.

A step-up converter would probably make more sense though, since the power requirement is not >100W.

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