Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How to Put USB-C Power on ANYTHING (almost)”.
Pretty much everyone agrees that the convenience of having one USBC power adapter for all of your devices is a good thing, but what about the year’s worth of gadgets we’ve accumulated that don’t support USBC, there’s a solution for that to demonstrate. We are going to take all of these retro consoles and bring them into the 21st century using Gan Chargers with USBC from ugreen, who sponsored this video, no more bulky power, adapters, no, more cable, clutter, no more struggling to find Reliable Replacements and, what’s really cool, is That you can do this on just about any device that accepts DC power, even if it has a barrel plug we’re. Talking monitors, laptops, routers, neck massagers, electronic dogs, small fans, external hard drive security, cameras, picture frames, Network switches, electronic dog garage door, sensors Networks, USBC is understandably confusing. There are multiple standards for data, multiple standards for power, cross-compatibility that works, except when it doesn’t, except when it does, but unofficially – and we endure this because ultimately, it’s still a lot better than the alternative. The focus of today’s video, USB PD or power delivery is just such a perfect example of this, because some of its features are optional. It’S common to run into products that support USB PD, but not all of USB PD. More on that later.
For now, let’s talk about how it’s supposed to work, because it’s really really cool out of a single wall: adapter and cable. You can get output from 5 to 20 volts even 48 volts on the latest version, and you don’t have to worry about getting the voltage wrong because it just figures out what your device needs when you plug it in like magic right, no, not like magic magic. Isn’T real and magicians are Shifty swindlers who steal your ear quarters? What we need here, then, is science.
In order to determine the correct voltage, a handshake process takes place between your charger and your device. The charger says: hey how many volts do you want? I’Ve Got 5, 9, 15 and 20 and the device says I’ll have 9 volts. Please they synchronize their watches and Shake Hands completing their electric ritual. But these old devices are to continue our handshake analogy completely handless. They have none of the requisite circuitry. To respond to our charger’s inquiry, so how do we give them a hand? Well, 5. Volt is easy. If your wall adapter detects a certain resistance along the two configuration pins, it’ll, just send back 5 volts, so two resistors on a USBC Port is enough to get you going. If you want any higher voltage, though you’re going to need some kind of logic board. Luckily, unlike some competing standards like Qualcomm quick charge, USB PD is royalty free, so these boards are plentiful and cheap and it is an open standard. So you could even build your own to suit your needs and it gets even better. These boards can be so small that they will fit inside the plug housing of an otherwise normal. Looking cable like this one, which is going to be extremely helpful for our use case, the NES super famicom and Sega Genesis all use 5.5 by 2.1 millimeter Barrel Jacks. The worldwide Super Nintendo used a larger Jack, for whatever reason I don’t know, Nintendo logic, probably so, if you have one of those you’ll need this inexpensive adapter from console 5.. With that, out of the way, these three consoles all use, 9 to 10 volt input power and at most one and a half amps of current meaning that a solution for one should be a solution for all.
But wait. There’S a bit of variance in their power requirements. Is that legal? Actually? Yes, if we look inside these consoles, not too far from the power input, we’ll find the venerable 7805 voltage regulator.
78 is the series and o5 is the number of bolts that it outputs and this bad boy, which has actually been in production for over 50 years, can accept input power from around 8 volts, all the way up to around 12 volts, usually or sometimes even as High as 20 volts, if it has a beefy enough heat sink but then hold on a second, this raises the question: if all the power for the internals is 5 volt anyway, why not just remove the regulator and then run 5 volt USB power directly into the System, you actually can do that, but you’ll need to take some extra precautions. A 5 volt USB power adapter can actually output anywhere from 4.4 to 5.2 volt, while still being within spec and perhaps more importantly, that output voltage will fluctuate slightly because of the conversion from AC current. This fluctuation is called Ripple and it is bad for your old electronics.
So you’d want a step up step down converter like this one. If you want to go that route, we’re not going that route, we’re going to take a walk down easy street with one of those cables. I showed you before these cost just a few dollars from out of fruit and use a built-in chip to request 9 volts from our USB PD wall adapter, which will certainly be enough for these consoles, regardless of what their original Power bricks might normally provide.
Gan power. Adapter not only smaller, but it actually has two ports and it’ll do 12. This is probably 45 Watts.
Hey yep, do a total of 45 Watts, no movie Magic, guys we’re going straight out of that wallboard into this NES and power. This bad boy up shut the front door, sick, okay, don’t play too long. No, no! I got ta win the whole game. Yeah! Oh damn it get it together.
Man get it together. The people are expecting better from you. I need the flute. No! No! It’S the first level the coolest thing about this is not only that we got rid of that giant, sketchy power adapter, but that we’re actually able to plug in two consoles to a single power. Adapter and remember when I said Power, delivery has some flaws.
Well, it’s extremely common for PD Chargers, especially compact Gan Chargers, to pause power to their already connected devices when a new one gets plugged in. They then perform a fresh handshake with every connected device. So you can see this in action, yeah short pause and power, and it’s back to be clear. This is a feature not a bug. It helps ensure that you can’t ask a charger to Output more than its capabilities safety first, but it is a little inconvenient for devices like these that don’t have a battery in them um. Since I lost my spot in the game, we might as well swap out this 45 watt charger, so we can power all three of these consoles at once super cool and it’s actually smaller than that crappy adapter. That was only able to do one of these consoles, but wait there’s more quick note. While this super famicom in Genesis do share a barrel Jack size with the NES and their power bricks will work with the NES and with each other. That comes with a slight caveat, super famicon and Genesis Barrel. Jacks are negative polarity, so basically it means the positive and negative are swapped around from where they are on a typical Barrel Jack. For this reason, they will not work with these cables unless a polarity converter is used while discovering this did not damage our systems.
Yours might not be so lucky. You have been warned. We’Ve got these. These newer consoles have AC power plugs, so you might think.
Surely they’re not gon na yeah, we are due to the nature of silicon transistors AC wall power must be converted to DC. So all we need to do is remove that internal AC to DC power supply and replace it with one that accepts 12 volt DC power from our wall adapter and converts it it to the 3.35 and 12 volt juice that our consoles drink. Conveniently there’s a fairly active community of modders who are building exactly what we need and out of these ones, that we purchased from game Tech us only the N64 one requires any soldering at all, and even then that’s only if you want to put it back to Stock again now that they’re all installed, then they take the same standard Barrel Jack size that the other three consoles take, which is kind of a dangerous thing, proceed with caution here, because, while they’re the same size, they are not the same voltage.
You might have noticed that when I listed the voltages supported by USB PD earlier, I didn’t mention 12 volt, specifically that’s because while the PD spec does include support for 12 volt, it’s not required and a lot of Manufacturers skip it. Thankfully, since we’re using ugreen nexo Chargers, we don’t have to worry about that. Every Gan charger in their lineup supports 12 volt power delivery, but you might say what about using other cables.
I mean one of the big selling points of USBC is that you can use one cable for a ton of different things and just plug that type c connector into everything. Well, on these modded consoles, you could achieve that by removing the barrel Jack and then installing a trigger board. There are some resources online for 3D printing, a triggerboard, but that requires soldering and it’s just easier if we find an alternative method. The N64, in particular, has a lot of room for activities in its giant removable power supply. So this is a panel Mount USBC Port, just plug a cable into one end plug in a cable to the other end, and it’s done you just have to drill some holes, tape up or shrink wrap the metal parts to keep them from shorting when it’s jostled And install, and now everything is running off of USBC. Actually, no, this isn’t everything this is.
This is stuff. That’S here. This isn’t enough. We need everything. Running off of USBC monitors, typically use anywhere from 12 to 20 volt power boom. Usbc network switch done this thing. Usbc, okay, everything is Type C now, so why don’t? I feel complete, probably because I haven’t told you this message from our sponsor ugreen provided all of the power adapters and sponsored this video and they’ve got huge black Friday discounts that you guys are going to want to check out down below if you’re, not convinced yet And you want to see even more reasons why you should type CFI everything check out that time we made James manually plug USB cables in over and over again to test their durability. Usbc ended up being really awesome.
.