[rektide]

The world after usb-pd looks so different. Everything used to be expensive bulky & proprietary.

It turns out usb-pd works pretty damned well.

It'll be a while before anything meaningful happens for this market though. 100w would power a huge range of tools but not all. 240w would be great, work for a huge range of tools with ton of overhead. But the lack probably has a much lower voltage that would need to be up-converted to 48v, then the power switching in the tool needs to handle higher voltage too (which I think is actually not a real concern, could actually help a lot).

But more obviously, it's a question of form factors. Tools have shapes that conform to & support their packs. USB doesn't have any kind of a play here right now, only defines a connector, cable & how data & power are to be transmitted.

It's hard to imagine getting out of this tar-pit. Whose going to start building more expensive packs that spit out standard 48v usb-pd? What hero would do that?

Side note, some day I'd really love to see a much higher amperage USB connector. Usb-d should be able to do like 30a, 1.5kW at 48v. Big ask, but it's one potential exciting frontier I hope "universal" extends into. My other ask is for a longer range 5+ gbps USB4, but that seems maybe potentially harder, I dunno.

[maxerickson]

Does it particularly make sense to link new DC power standards to USB?

Like I expect I'd rather have Bluetooth control over stuff plugged into the wall vs having a combined communication/high(er) power cable.

[rektide]

I'd love for there to be some competition. Absolutely.

This submission is about cordless power tools batteries, so that somewhat affects the scope. In general, cords can be super dangerous & limiting for power tools, so battery based has naturally really taken the heck over, for all kinds of good reasons. Even still, I think the questioning is fine & good, could apply to this segment.

Bluetooth is a bit hard because of pairing. Where-as a physical connection is unmistakable & zero additional effort.

I'd also point out, we're still bloody fucking awful, just dogshit terrible, about using USB. USB-hid has really nice specs for batteries & chargers to offer telemetry. Our wall chargers could report tons of stats on what they think is happening. Our batteries could self report all kind of stats. There's no good reason we have simply ignored the longstanding spec for so long, made such & continue to make such poor use of USB, other than abysmal expectations & abysmal delivery. (well, for a while, usb charging's high power modes only worked if there wasnt any data, and that was a dumb if valid reason).

It would be great to see usb-pd batteries keep winning and wireless telemetry.

[maxerickson]

Oh, the Bluetooth thing was just an aside about not caring about having communications on the same cable as power for higher power devices, I don't think it's very relevant to power tools.

My point was more about not having the higher power delivery implementation tied to a complicated, relatively expensive, high speed data bus.

The reason stuff doesn't do any reporting is that people mostly don't care and it would add some small incremental cost, it's not a big mystery.

[WorldMaker]

> My point was more about not having the higher power delivery implementation tied to a complicated, relatively expensive, high speed data bus.

The reason most DC power delivery systems failed to be general purpose was that unless you pick some not very useful lowest common denominator voltage you need some sort of data bus to request/negotiate/handshake voltage for each device. If you are already building in a data bus into your power delivery lines you might as well give it some speed so that you could run other communications over it, at which point you likely just wind-up reinventing something like USB if you are planning a "simple, dumb DC power delivery standard".

[Tagbert]

Bluetooth is much more complicated than the basic power negotiation on USB-PD.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

At my last job we designed a lot of wireless devices. One problem we saw frequently was that in high population-density areas, e.g., apartment buildings in NYC, Bluetooth was often useless because there was simply so much interference from so many devices in a small space.

Wired communication definitely still has its place.

[JohnFen]

The USB connector is the problem here. For a tool like these, I'd certainly want one that's more rugged than USB-C. Those things are fragile.

[crote]

It could potentially be fixed by overmolding the USB-C connector: keep the connector, but stick it in a little jacket to make it foolproof. A bit like etherCON[0]: compatible, but way more rugged. They actually already have variants for USB-A![1]

There is already a USB-C variant, but that one seems a bit lacking.[2]

[0]: https://www.neutrik.com/en/products/data/ethercon

[1]: https://www.neutrik.com/en/neutrik/products/multimedia-conne...

[2]: https://www.neutrik.com/en/neutrik/products/multimedia-conne...

[JohnFen]

I thought we were talking about USB-C as the interface between the battery and the tool. If that's the case, the connector would be embedded in the battery so it mates with the receptacle when you clip the battery onto the tool. There wouldn't be something you can put a sleeve on (and that wouldn't be necessary as the case of the battery is, effectively, the ruggedized sleeve.)

I have an SBC that mates with an external hard drive in this way. You put the hard drive in an enclosure that clamps onto the base of the SBC and a USB-C connector mates when you do.

That's what needs to be more rugged. It's not just external side-to-side forces here, it's the actual mating and unmating of the connector that needs to be ruggedized. USB-C is too delicate for that, at least in my experience.

You want something that has big, beefy contacts that can handle being connected and disconnected a lot, by people who are not being anything close to careful when they're doing it.

[rektide]

If the battery already had to slide into place, it the jack & plug were already pre-aligned, I think the connector reliability would be absurdly good.

The biggest on the job problem would probably shift away from mechanical stress entirely, & be an issue of degree. Sawdust & gunk getting into the jack or plug.

I agree that a better connector would be awesome. I'd love a high amp big leafy thing.