At this point, many of us have gone all-in on USB-C. It’s gotten to the point that when you occasionally run across a gadget that doesn’t support being powered USB-C, the whole experien…
If you look at the circuit diagram in their documentation linked from that article, that thing doesn’t even support USB-PD or even just the USB 1.0 device side of the negotiation to increase the current limit from the default (150mA in USB 3) to high (900mA in USB 3). It will look like it works fine if you connect it to a dumb USB power supply (because those thing don’t really do any USB protocol stuff, just dumbly supply power over USB connectors up to the power source’s limit) but if you connect it to, say, a PC USB port (which does implement the USB host side of the USB protocol), your circuit on the breadboard that worked fine when using a dumb USB power supply with that breadboard adaptor might not work because the current it needs exceeds that default 150mA limit for devices that haven’t done USB negotiation (worse if it’s a USB 2.0 port, as the limit is lower for those)
This thing is basically the same as the chinese power breadboard adaptors you can get in places like Aliexpress, but with a USB-C connector instead of a Type-A, micro-USB or mini-USB one, plus its better designed (it has a proper Buck Converter instead of a cheap Votage Regulator, plus better power supply filtering and a polyfuse to protect it and the host from current overdraws).
The headline and the article seriously exagerate this “achievement”.
Yes, there is not much going on on this board, but since those trigger boards with USB-PD functionality are so cheap these days, it should have been possible to add such a trigger chip. If you wanted to go the really fancy route you could even use PPS and allow for pretty much arbitrary voltages.
Personally I just have an old micro USB cable I cut the end off of and soldered solid-core wire to. Just plug the USB-A end into a battery bank and the wires into the breadboard rails and you’ve got a stable 5V supply.
I rarely needed 3.3V on a breadboard, but when I did I usually had a 5V to 3.3V voltage translator already on the board which was enough to get by.
If you look at the circuit diagram in their documentation linked from that article, that thing doesn’t even support USB-PD or even just the USB 1.0 device side of the negotiation to increase the current limit from the default (150mA in USB 3) to high (900mA in USB 3). It will look like it works fine if you connect it to a dumb USB power supply (because those thing don’t really do any USB protocol stuff, just dumbly supply power over USB connectors up to the power source’s limit) but if you connect it to, say, a PC USB port (which does implement the USB host side of the USB protocol), your circuit on the breadboard that worked fine when using a dumb USB power supply with that breadboard adaptor might not work because the current it needs exceeds that default 150mA limit for devices that haven’t done USB negotiation (worse if it’s a USB 2.0 port, as the limit is lower for those)
This thing is basically the same as the chinese power breadboard adaptors you can get in places like Aliexpress, but with a USB-C connector instead of a Type-A, micro-USB or mini-USB one, plus its better designed (it has a proper Buck Converter instead of a cheap Votage Regulator, plus better power supply filtering and a polyfuse to protect it and the host from current overdraws).
The headline and the article seriously exagerate this “achievement”.
Yes, there is not much going on on this board, but since those trigger boards with USB-PD functionality are so cheap these days, it should have been possible to add such a trigger chip. If you wanted to go the really fancy route you could even use PPS and allow for pretty much arbitrary voltages.
Personally I just have an old micro USB cable I cut the end off of and soldered solid-core wire to. Just plug the USB-A end into a battery bank and the wires into the breadboard rails and you’ve got a stable 5V supply. I rarely needed 3.3V on a breadboard, but when I did I usually had a 5V to 3.3V voltage translator already on the board which was enough to get by.