Are YOU suffering from PSU fatigue?
 

I know I am.

I have so many PSUs now I can barely work out which one supplies which device. I noticed it as a particular problem when I moved house last. I had two large carrier bags full of 'em, weighing over 30lbs, all tangled up. And they just keep growing like some sinister breed of weed. Every time I replace a camera, cellphone, computer, DVD player/writer, whatever; it comes with a new PSU. And they're all slightly different and have different voltage and current specs and hardly ever the same pinouts. It's driving me nuts. Why can't someone invent a UNIVERSAL PSU config that fits ALL portable devices and re-charges ALL batteries? It's easily do-able. First step: agree a UNIVERSAL output plug/socket specification that ALL devices and chargers MUST accommodate to be legally sold. Second, make the voltage and current outputs individually adjustable in ranges. 99% of portable devices could be charged or powered or both by a simple range selection of 3-20V and 50mA-7A. How fucking hard can that be???

This is really pissing me off.

Your thoughts, please....

Penn State?

No I went to Purdue.

That would be the Capitalist 'Conservatives' complaining that we are too 'Socialist' and that the free market will 'fix' it self if we have 'faith' to let all those lesser people die off first....

I mean, you are making too much sense. And not enough. Different sized portables require more or less voltage/amperage which requires more or less battery ratings which requires more or less of a power wart.

HOWEVER, considering that many things fall into an acceptable range of categories you could bring your 20 down to a 5 and be well off. Not to mention standardizing the dedicated power port.

Just remember, the FCC requires that all consumer electronics "must accept all interference." This way the government can send it's radio TV head mind controlling waves.

Why don't you make your own universal adapter?
1.)Make a transformer that will do AC --> AC plusing, AC --> DC and DC --> DC.

2.)Make this transformer able to switch the polarity between center positive and negative.

3.)Make say transformer able to change voltage (.2v all the way to 240v)

4.)Make this transformer able to change its current (.1a to 80a)

Once this is complete, it no longer matters what things come with what, snipe of the wire that it proprietary and connect it to your new transformer and keep doing this until you at a the point were you can power everything with this one transformer. Now you only need this one transformer to do everything, if you wanted to you could even use a voltage regulator and some trickery and have multiple things plugged in at the same time.

There already exist such things, but I've only seen small ones like this one:
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/show...number=305-305
I have a similar one, but you'll need one with more power output than that, however it does work well if you lose a transformer for a device. I think it's really neat, because you can change voltages, plugs, and polarity easily.

Part of the issue here is economics. If you have a LG phone you'll get a wall wart for it. But if you want to plug it into your car, you'll also need to buy the car adapter. If everything was universal, you'd only ever need to buy one car adapter. But they change the plugs periodically so that each time you buy a new phone, you'll also have to purchase a new car adapter that will fit the new phone. Economics.

Also, there really can never be any REAL standard. Because of the differences in voltage/amp requirements for each device. Also size of devices and capability (data/power) plays a big role.

There needs to be no standard, they have already solved your problem, use a power inverter, (12VDC --> 120VAC) it provides plugs like the ones in your home, so you no longer need to use any mobile adapter.

Or you could do it my way, take a part the original adapter and build your own, since you would know where everything goes (the data signals wont be going to any coils (transformers) or inductors so its not hard to understand how it works), make a transformer you can plug anything into, it's differentially possible. The manufacturers may not like you very much, but since when is it in my best interest to care what a manufacturer wants? knowledge is power and I intend to use what I know.

There was talk about a standard for a while.Of course that wont happen.Those are high markup spare parts....

Then mark them.

There is already standard power outlet specification (ah, wait, there's at least two of them), and I really think this should be enough. Besides, different devices has different power requirements (voltage), and it won't be wise to force them all to use same voltage/pinout - this might limit number of possible designs for portable devices. So although it is possible to create universal PSU for switches/modems and other network "junk", such standard won't hold for long for portable devices - manufacturers will quickly break it.

Not going to happen, because cellphone manufacturers might choose make custom battery to fit phone design.

I had "universal" PSU with 5 different connectors and adjustable voltage/polarity. However, they probably won't be ever used commonly - because when user has option to pick voltage/polarity, there is a really good chance that user will pick wrong one (and although some equipment will survive that, some other equipment can be damaged). So it is not going to happen on a large scale.

Throw away unused PSUs. I also suspect that if there were universal PSUs your grate would weight much more. 30 lbs (13 kilograms) isn't that much, anyway (I could understand your complaints if total weight was above 50 kg...).

I have thrown away the unused ones! And 30lbs/13Kg is an awful lot when you consider the typical device is only supplying around 12V at less than half an Amp!

Why so emotional?

13Kg is a weight of accordion. Which isn't much, at least I'm used to it (anyway, you probably have a car, what's the problem?). In any case, you probably know that most of that weight is taken by "transformer". Since (AFAIK) core thickness(and weight) vary according to power consumptions of device, universal device probably would weight more (because it would be supposed to support maximum current/power). I might be wrong about it (not a electronics geek), information requires checking. As for manufacturers - they probably won't care unless majority of users will complain about it. So you can either build custom "power hub" which will supply power to all devices at once, get used to it, or wait for advances in wireless energy transfers or solar power (but I think that solar battery will weight even more).

You would be correct, the more power you need the bigger the inductors are, this gets even heavyer if you use an iron core transformer since it's an iron ring it provides much better results but weighs a lot more.

That's with linear power supplies. But more and more frequently, manufactuers are using switched-mode supplies which are very much lighter. I have a schematic somewhere that one can build a simple PSU that converts 230VAC (the standard here in europe) to 12VDC. It uses only six diodes and a few capacitors. I couldn't believe something so simple would work, so simulated the circuit in SPICE and amazingly it worked as advertised. I'll bet it was noisy as hell, though. Not that that matters one whit for recharging, though.

Not only noisy, but built cheap, I'd rather use old reliable when it comes to my electronics. I like my electronics, so I tend to stay on the safe side, something that weight more but is better at doing something is better to me then something that weghs less but is not as reliable.

Oh, I agree entirely in principle. But if you tend to move residences frequently as I do, I'm afraid you find transformers are very high on the list of articles you really do NOT want to have to repeatedly hump around!