Wednesday, May 11, 2016

USB Charger Notes

So while I've been working on a project at work, I've been doing some stuff with USB ports and drawing safe amounts of power from them.

There's a lot of information out there on this subject, and the official standard (Battery Charging Specification Revision 1.2, by the USB Implementers Forum, is the latest version I could find, and the one I used for my work project. Get in touch if you can't find a copy of it!) contains a very good runthrough on identifying standards-compliant USB ports.

But there's some very big names that are /not/ standards compliant, and historically have very little chance of becoming standards compliant in the near future(coughcoughApplecough). There's a lot of information about these chargers, as well, but not quite enough, as I've managed to find a seemingly undocumented variant of an official Apple charger. Apple chargers put specific voltages on the data pins that are used for determining the amount of current that the attached device is allowed to draw. I also include Apple model numbers, for easy reference to see if you've found a "new" device that's not on here, though there's actually not room left in this non-standard-standard for new ones...

Description Apple Model # Rated Output D+ Voltage D- Voltage
2.5W Charger None 0.5A 2.0V 2.0V
5W Charger A1102 1.0A@5.0V 2.0V 2.7V
5W Charger A1205 1.0A@5.0V 2.0V 2.7V
5W Charger A1265 1.0A@5.0V 2.0V 2.7V
10W Charger A1357 2.1A@5.1V 2.7V 2.0V
12W Charger A1401 2.4A@5.2V 2.7V 2.7V

The 2.5W charger values are not actually found in an Apple-sold charger, but was found in third-party Apple-compatible products.  It may or may not work on an Apple device at this point, but there are chargers floating around that use those values to indicate that they are a 2.5W charger.

Building off of that and including the Battery Charging Specification Rev1.2, we can build a table of states that can identify both standard and Apple chargers. For each column in this table, if a given row is not filled, that test does not need to be done to determine whether this port is that type. For each row in this table, all filled columns' tests should be done in a left-to-right manner. The rows should be tested for from top to bottom, and the first match will be the limit used. Terms used here that have not been mentioned previously are most likely referring to the Battery Charging Specification.

Description Allowed Current Primary Detection, CHG_DET state Secondary Detection, DCP_DET state D+ Voltage D- Voltage
Standard Downstream Port 0.1A for 45 minutes False - - Below 2.0V
Apple 12W Charger 2.4A False - 2.7V 2.7V
Apple 5W Charger 1A False - 2.0V 2.7V
Apple 10W Charger 2A False - 2.7V 2.0V
Apple 2.5W Charger 500mA False - 2.0V 2.0V
Dedicated Charging Port At Least 500mA True True - -
Charging Downstream Port 1.5A True False - -

Note that this does NOT cover every type of charger covered in the Battery Charging Specification! These are only the states that can be tested for with only the main four USB pins, and without actually enumerating as a device. The fifth pin available on mini/micro USB ports adds a whole lot of configurability to devices that support using it, and enumerating opens up a lot of possibilities(Like the ability to be denied power), but for the purposes of my work project, this is as far as I am able to go with this.

Please be careful, especially with the SDP state! We don't want to burn up people's USB ports! Read the Battery Charging Specification for a lot more details, but this table is one that I ended up building just to double-check my program against, so hopefully someone else finds it useful.

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