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Comment by emptybottle | Hacker News Reader

Hoping this pans out. I was gifted a black and decker drill which has a proprietary shape charge cable, and of course that cable has been misplaced.

A reasonable standard would prevent so much equipment from entering the landfill due to lost/expensive cables.

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I agree. I find it to be quite annoying having to worry about misplacing my Philips Sonicare charger, electric shaver charger. I've already had to replace some of them but I also find it to be particularly arduous packing them for extended trips and also having to worry about {100,110,240}V compatibility.

I have replaced a bunch of annoying DC barrel chargers with little usb-c to barrel adapters, if your charger uses a barrel, odds are you can find one that will work.

As intriguing as those are, how do you know what voltage is being selected?

Of the ones I've seen, they either

a) just pass through 5v from the charger

b) Support PD and have a button to let you cycle through voltages (so you have to be careful not to fry your electronics)

Hmm, just plugging one of the buttonless ones I have in to a recent-ish Asus Vivobook with a tester inline, it shows 19.6V / 1.68A. The original charger for this laptop was 45W, so this is not quite as performant, but close enough for my purposes.

They are designed for laptops so I would expect them to in theory be choosing the right voltage for whatever brand the plug was designed, but they should not be used on random electriconics unless they specify the output voltage!

"USB-C trigger" seems to be the magic phrase to search for.

I mean this still has a charger with a proprietary connector to the battery. just the PSU for that charger is usb-c now (at least for the dewalt one)

That’s true (for now), and hopefully this is just a first step. As that, it does have other perks too. The Dewalt adapter is 2-way, allowing you to use existing batteries to power USB-C devices.

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