Small miner viability question: USB-C bus power?

[philipma1957]

Thank you for the research.  Beyond stupid as barrel adapters are far more sturdy then usb-c cables and ports will ever be.

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[NotFuzzyWarm]

Ja. What's scary is that per the paper, "Because of this (wide availability of micro usb cables), the European Union has discussed the potential of adopting the USB Type-C connector as the standard for (delivering power to) all future devices bought and sold in its region."

Great. So not only will you still need a wall wart or dedicated PD port but it will also mean that because they are physically the same, usb-c devices will have to be smart enough to know if PD or data target is plugged into the 2 or more usb-c ports (1 PD, 1 data) on the device and be sure that the data cable is a data cable vs a power only cable. Issues with the earlier Avalons caused by folks using a usb charger cable vs full up power & data cable comes to mind...

[kano]

Well I see it as a better solution vs using 'bricks'
I do have a few high power (60W) USB-C chargers that of course, as you mentioned, don't handle data.
But, I'd wonder how it would last 24x7 so I'd probably avoid it also.
I guess if it becomes common, as NotFuzzyWarm's article mentions, they'd start making them better at dissipating more heat.
As for bricks, I've yet to see one that's designed to stay cool, or worse, it has a tight seal keeping all the heat in.

I've not gone near using a brick on anything to do with mining since I started.
When miners arrived with bricks I still wired them straight to a PSU - which of course needs the 1c paper-clip power on.

There was someone on the forum who used to sell the molex->usb cables (but I only used that for powering RPi),
but for the R606 (and the sidehack hub) I've used the PCI-e connection - obviously straight from a (dedicated) PSU.

So basically, what I'm saying is, I think it's way better to use a PSU with a PCI-e connection to the miner
You don't need much power - and most standard cheap PC PSU's should have more than enough power and should be good at dissipating heat

[12kev34]

I Think it would be nice to have a Usb pd miner that Automaticly sets its clock an voltage setting to wahtever is avalible from the from the usb pd brick. For example wehn you have a 9v/3a brick the miner changes its voltage an freqency to stay withhin the 27w Avalibe or at a 20v 5a brick to the 100ws

[DaveF]

Good idea but... As was mentioned above and on some other boards a lot of the bricks can do 100w but not 24/7 for months on end.

So now you need more intelligent power adapters and more intelligent control chips on the miners so they can talk. So the price goes up a bit. Then you have some manufacturers taking shortcuts so they claim 100w for 24/7/365 but in reality it's not. Then whoever made the miner gets grief because it's acting odd and the person who bought the $4.99 power adapter instead of the $49.99 one can't believe that the lowest price thing they found on eBay is not what it says it is.

You saw this a lot and still see it in the hardware support section. Odd things happening, and it turns out to be poor power.

-Dave

[sidehack]

Plus, apparently, PD power with data basically doesn't exist so you'd still need two cables so what's the point.