Get ready for some Type-C action.
One USB To Rule Them All: USB Type-C Connector Specification Finalized : Read more
One USB To Rule Them All: USB Type-C Connector Specification Finalized : Read more
I'm most excited about the ability to plug it in, in any orientation. If there are 2 ways to plug in a USB cable, I always find the opposite one first.
"this spec is designed to replace them all"
Wasn't this the intent of USB when it was first rolled out?
I cannot find the pinout anywhere yet but I would be surprised if there were that many unused pins: Type-C carries all the same signals as USB 3.0 Type-A and to carry its 5A high-power spec with its tiny pins, it likely has a bunch of extra power/ground pins.
Looking at the plug model, there are four "long finger" type connections and those are always either power or ground so it looks like they at least doubled the number of power/ground pins.
That leaves only one pin unknown since the back pins are cross-wired to the front pins.
Yes but the initially designed USB to be half-duplex, meaning that only one side can send data at any given time. With USB 3.0, they made it full-duplex so both sides can communicate at the same time. This is what they should have done in the first place so that we wouldn't need to redesign the connectors now."this spec is designed to replace them all"
Wasn't this the intent of USB when it was first rolled out?
SirKnobsworth :You need a "fully featured cable" for that, along with devices at both ends that support it. Normal Type-C cables will just be mirrored at both ends to avoid the six or so extra wires in the cable.
Ironic how USB used to tout how its cables were so much simpler and cheaper than FireWire's six but now, fully-featured USB 3.1 cables are going to have about 16 wires.
That is not what section 4.1 of the Type-C doc says...
"SuperSpeed USB serial data interface defines 1 differential transmit pair and 1 differential receive pair. On a USB Type-C receptacle, two sets of SuperSpeed USB signal pins are defined to enable plug flipping feature"
The baseline Type-C spec is designed to allow passive adapters with USB3 Type-A and Type-B. Type-C to USB3 Type-A/B only requires the same eight wires as USB3 Type-A requires: 5V, GND, D+/-.TX+/- and RX+/-.
The "Fully Featured" cable (the ones fully wired from end to end) is only defined as an optional feature/extension (section 5: extensions / alternate modes) for Type-C to Type-C cables.