Do you find the 6-pin charge-only Type-C connectors too small? Or the 16-pin 2.0-only ones? They seem reasonably hand-solder-friendly but I admit I've been fortunate enough to have the factory handling them for me.
Yeah, I find the 16-pin ones a little beyond my skill. They also feel silly—why can’t I have one with just six pins for D±, VBUS, GND, and CC1/2? I guess I could have a factory make a bunch of modules like that for me, but it definitely feels like a thing that should already exist.
(There are passive A-to-C adapters, so I see no reason why I couldn’t short pin pairs like that.)
I have soldered the 12-pin, power-only USB-C connectors. The real breakthrough came though when I tried a hotplate rather than soldering iron for the USB-C connector.
Could you clarify? As far as I can tell, GND is A1/B1 and A12/B12, VBUS is A4/B4 and A9/B9, D+ is A6/B6, and D− is A7/B7, and each A pin swaps with its B counterpart when I flip the connector.
Only one side of the cable is going to be lit, but you don't know which one it is: it depends on whatever happened upstream. So you have to be able to handle either side being lit up. You can't easily do that with a single set of contacts because of how D+/D- is handled (it would be a literal X-shaped crossover), so now you're kind of stuck.
It ends up just not being worth the trouble if you need the USB 2.0 pair. But power-only is much easier and, guess what, pretty available in the market.
The 6-pin Type-C provides 2 pins each for power, ground, and CC. (DO NOT LEAVE CC OUT. THIS IS WHY A LOT OF RECENT USB STUFF MISBEHAVES. GET CC1/2 RIGHT PLEASE.)
The 16-pin adds 10 more: 4 for D+/D-, 2 more each for power and ground, and then they add 2 more for SBU as well. I'm not entirely sure why SBU is important enough but I'd guess it's because it's physically vertically next to CC so probably helps the mechanicals to leave it in.
There actually do exist 8-pin guys like this https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C47326494.html (among others) that add D+/D- only to the 6-pin connectors. I can't imagine they work terribly well most of the time but they must have some use? They do seem to be from Asian vendors only, which might mean something.
(Side note: the way Type-C handles D+ and D- has caused me so much pain. I get that it was a difficult problem to solve... but there had to be a better way than this, right? Probably not, but I can still whine.)
I was glad to see this at first (because I did page through Mouser and LCSC a bit before I came back here to continue my bitching and found nothing). Then I actually looked at the drawing, and— Excuse me, is that really a USB-C socket that only works in one orientation?.. The drawing shows that the socket has both CC1 (A5) and CC2 (B5) but only one of the two copies of D+ (A6 but not B6) and D- (A7 but not B7). Seriously? Even I don’t hate my users that much.
Yep. I couldn't believe it existed either. I was even curious enough to ask an LLM about it and got the same response: it doesn't know of a use beyond creating frustration.
I guess past-me was smart when drawing USB-C connector symbols in my library and this one doesn't exist there for a reason!
