There is a reason for USB-C extensions not to be part of the standard. They can be bothersome in the best case and dangerous in the worst.
There is a reason for USB-C extensions not to be part of the standard. They can be bothersome in the best case and dangerous in the worst.
This sounds solvable, doesn’t it? Have the extension cable have a chip saying it can do X at maximum, then compare with whatever is to be extended and communicate the minimum of both upstream. Might not become a sleek cable-like design, but would extend the 240W cable with the extender safely staying at 120W
That’s an active extension cable, which is essentially a single port USB hub.
Shouldn’t it be possible to only do the negotiation part and otherwise bridge everything? Not having to do anything high-bandwidth actively should keep the silicon costs down.
Yes, and such cables already exist, like this splitter cable:
https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0CRZ6JJ6D (not an affiliate link)
It’s not an extension cable, but it does exactly what you are suggesting. It gets the available PD profiles from the charger and then intelligently negotiates a profile that will work best to split the power to the 2 devices connected to it. The charger thinks it’s just connected to 1 device, and the connected devices think they are directly connected to a charger.
Doing the same for with a USB C extension would be trivial, but it’s probably hard to market such a cable when passive USB c extension cables are available at a fraction of the cost, even if those aren’t compliant to the USB standard
Heh heh heh. Wait till you dive into the world of “That $15 cable costs 12c to make.”
Getting $30 cables for $3 with my employee discount was almost the only good thing about working for Best Buy in the early 2000s.
I’m right now in China and those cables cost $0.50 shipped to your address, so not surprised
Well, the source checks the cable using the CC line which doesn’t go through the cable (VCONN). So source only knows the cable directly plugged in. To make the extension cable visible, the sink would be required to check the cable plugged in using VCONN and then the tell max ampere to the source over the other CC that goes through the cable.
2 Problems:
Sink devices normally don’t read or can’t read VCONN as far as I know
No way of detecting if a third cable (extension in the middle) is present and what specs it has