Extracting Power From USB Type C

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For the last decade or so, we’ve been powering and charging our portable devices with USB. It’s a system that works; you charge batteries with DC, and you don’t want to have a wall wart for every device, so just grab a USB hub and charge your phone and you headphones or what have you. Now, though, we have USB Type C, with Power Delivery. Theoretically, we can pull a hundred Watts over a USB cable. What if we could tap into that with screw terminals?

That’s the idea behind [Jakob]’s entry to the Hackaday Prize. It’s a USB 3.1 Type C to Type A adapter, but it also has the neat little bonus of adding screw terminals. Think of it as jumper cables for your laptop or phone, but don’t actually do that.

[Jakob]’s board consists of a USB Type C receptacle on one end, and a Type A plug on the other, while in between those two sockets is an STM32G0 microcontroller that handles the power negotiation and PD protocol. This gives the USB Type C port dual role port (DRP) capability, so the power connection can go both ways. Add in a screw terminal, and you can theoretically get 20 Volts at 5 Amps through a pair of wires. Have fun with that.

Right now, [Jakob] has all the files in a Gitlab with the schematic and layout available here. It’s an interesting project that has tons of applications of USB hackery, and more than enough power to do some really fun stuff.



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