I thought to myself: wouldn’t it be nice if I could glance at the device being charged and quickly understand if it’s fully charged or not? For example the MagSafe connectors have an LED which turns green once the charging is done.

I came up with a couple (yes, literally two) of possible solutions for this:

• There are chargers which display the voltage / current / power being delivered (the Pinepower for example, which I like because it takes a grounded input – hopefully it actually does something useful with it internally!)
• Cables which show the power being delivered through them. It just so happens that the wast majority of the devices we want to charge use USB-C (thank you EU!) and for the remainder I’m fine with sticking an adapter on top the cable or using a separate cable which doesn’t have a charging indicator.

But even after deciding to go with the second solution, I wasn’t done, because manufacturers can surprise you in many ways. For example, here is one cable claiming to be passing through ~120W of power, when – in fact – it’s passing through about half of it:

This is annoying, because it means that it can’t be used to answer the question: “can this charger deliver more power to my laptop or not?”.

Even worse, here is the same cable still claiming to be delivering about 120W, while – in fact – the laptop is fully charged and drawing less than 1W of power:

Which makes it totally useless for the intended purpose (to ascertain if the device is still charging or not). Also, tip: the displays of these cables are frequently very flickery. Which isn’t an issue normally, since I don’t intend to look at it for more than a second. But they have such a low refresh rate that my phone camera captures “in between” images. However, I found that shooting a short video and then exporting a frame of it works for capturing a reasonable image.

To end on a more positive note: I found two cables which, based on my testing, do provide more reliable measurement of the current flowing through them. Here are the links to them on AliExpress (although, given how frequently things change there, the links might be already obsolete…):

• 240W Type C Fast Charging Cable
• PZOZ retractable usb c to type c

I even tested the cables by connecting my phone to my laptop and they do support some data transfer (didn’t test the speeds though). Here are the leads that are connected for the first one:

And here are the ones for the PZOZ retractable one:

For reference, here is snapshot from an “official” high speed/high power cable that came with a Dell (?) monitor:

Interestingly, although it has almost all pins connected, it’s missing two of them – which are connected in the first cable.

But anyway, I’ve went on for long enough. May this be useful to you in picking the right cable for your needs!

It’s nice that more and more devices have USB-C interfaces. Yet, they are not without their particularities:

• Not all chargers / cables are the same. They support different volts and amps, so, to support the fastest charging possible for your device (phone / laptop / tablet), make sure to select the right one.
  • In particular I was surprised that my phone wasn’t “fast charging” with several different laptop chargers I tried. Turns out (with the help of an USB voltage analyzer) that they were delivering 2 Amps at 9V and my phone was expecting 3 Amps for fast charging. Those (Dell / HP) laptop chargers were plenty powerful to deliver the total watts at higher voltages, but I guess 9V just wasn’t their priority.
  • Quick tip if you don’t want to poke around with USB analyzers for finding a good charger: look for something that has “fast charger” in the name and then test it with your equipment (hopefully you can still send it back if it doesn’t work for you). I had good experiences with the Fairphone chargers and with the UGreen chargers / cables.
• USB-C is seemingly symmetric (ie. you can plug it in both ways and “it works”). That said, some cheap products / cables only implement half of the connections, so if something is not working, try rotating the cable 180° (↺) and see if that works.
  • That said, dust/lint buildup can also be a problem, here is a page on the iFixit forums discussing how to clean the ports.
• You can have “USB-C” products which don’t work / don’t charge unless a USB-A to C cable is used (so they don’t work with a USB-C laptop charger for example for a USB-C to C cable). What’s that about?
  • USB-A always delivers a small amount of current at 5V when something gets plugged in (and then the device / source can negotiate higher voltages / amps if supported). USB-C in turn doesn’t output anything though, unless the consumer has some specific resistors. The “USB-C” (and I put USB-C in quotes here, since they can’t really claim to be an USB-C equipment, since they don’t conform to the spec) gadgets which only work with the A-to-C cables are missing these resistors, most probably because the manufacturer wanted to save a couple of cents (I’ve only seen this on cheap devices). Not much that can be done here, other than using the A-to-C cables ¹

Happy charging!

Photo taken from Andreas G with permission.

1. Yes, theoretically we could add the resistors if we have the time / equipment. Also, theoretically it would be easy to make some adapters / cables that have the resistors in them – I’m surprised that I haven’t seen anything like that. Although, I guess, they have a high risk of being used incorrectly, so maybe it’s better this way. ︎

Personalized USB Drive is a great gift for the geek in your life, but it will be appreciated by non-geeks also. And if you think that they won’t find a use for it (even for the ones which look like bracelets :-)), you can always go with an MP3 player.

After doing some due-diligence (like searching around for complaints related to the company and looking since when they are in operation, they seem to be a good source to order these gadgets from. One word of caution though: they offer multiple brands of flash drives for customization. I would recommend choosing a more well-know brand, rather than going with the cheapest option. I’m saying this because I saw that one type of MP3 player they offer for sale is very similar to Canyon one I bought many years ago when I was still a student (because back than it was the cheapest option). It had problems from the start (like the previous-next rocker switch not working properly) and it didn’t last more than a year (not that all Canyon products are necessarily unreliable – since then I’ve had two Canyon routers – one wired and one wireless – and both work perfectly to this day). The moral of the story is that you should go with well-known brands to avoid the hassle.

Finally, if you do decide to buy a USB storage device (either for yourself or as a gift), make sure that you “vaccinate” it against autorun worms and read up on the encryption options available for USB drives, since (due to their small size and mobility) they are in constant danger of being lost with all the data on them.

Full disclosure: this is a paid review from ReviewMe. Under the terms of the understanding I was not obligated to skew my viewpoint in any way (ie. only post positive facts).