 IonMPI brought to you by Digi-Key and Adafrit this week. It's CUI Devices Lediator. What is this week's new product introduction? This week's IonMPI is one of my favorite things. It's a USB PD power brick from CUI. So what it looks like? It's basically your kind of standard desktop power brick. This is a 30 watt power supply. It's got a USB-C cable on it and it's a multi-voltage USB PD power supply that you can you can see you can change the power plug to be you know US or UK or EU. And what I like about this series is the SDI 30 CUT series is basically this allows you to have a very high quality low quiescent current very efficient power supply that you can use for your products. It matches a lot of safety standards. It's UL. It's FCC. It's CE. All the safety and compliance you want and the best part is because it's USB PD sorry USB type C PD power delivery. You can use this one power plug for a vast number of projects and products that you may sell. So if you see down here sorry this is the data sheet. So you can see at the bottom there it says the output voltages for example 5 volts you can get 3 amps 9 volts 3 amps 15 volts 12 amps and 20 volts 1.5 amps so basically you know 30 watts maximum to get the maximum voltage of course you have to go to 15 or 20 volts you can't get that at 5 volts because USB-C doesn't really like to give you more than 3 amps no matter what the voltage but the power supply will automatically select the correct voltage based on the USB-C device that it's plugged into and I think that this is handy because this is a nice upgrade to what we've been using for the last like 20 30 50 years which is 5.5 millimeter slash 2.1 millimeter DC jacks. You have these you know I'm sure you have tons of these types of power adapters at home they look like this they're called wall warts because they're a little bit warty you plug them in and you get that 2.1 slash 5.5 millimeter jack on the end but the thing that's really annoying is every power adapter is slightly different so like this one for example is 9 volt 1 amp but you have to look on the label some are going to be 5 volts 2 amps some are going to be 20 volts half an amp I mean they can be any voltage you know almost any current limiting amount and some are you know AC only some are DC output some are positive tips some are negative tip you know there's one connector but it's used for like you know a variety of different voltages and current capabilities so you know one solution is well you can have one of these adjustable adapters where you can dial in voltages this is like I think a 3 to 12 volt adapter and you can see it's got that standard 5.5 2.1 millimeter end here's one from another company where you you can select different voltages and different tips almost everybody has one of these and then you immediately lose the tips and you're really annoyed because it's the one you wanted so basically everybody has a gigantic pile of power supplies for all the things in your house and you can never throw anything away because that's the one power supply you need you know because you need like some weird voltage like three volts at five amps for your battery charger or something so you know a couple years ago maybe 10 15 years ago a lot of companies especially companies making small gadgets and electronic devices were like we can't take it anymore first off the DC jack is a huge connector second you never know what you're gonna get and the risk is very high that people gonna plug in the wrong kind of adapter so let's go with USB because USB is 5 volts 5 watts 1 amp maybe 2 amps so you can get 10 watts if you don't mind having a thick cable so here's a CUI devices power adapter it's nice and svelte it's got this like oval shape very nifty looking you plug USB in and then you can use this to charge I mean this is really popularized by mobile phones you know everybody has this mobile phone or you know mobile music player or GPS or watch or whatever electronic device that you charge over USB or micro USB so you can get these with you know this is a version of the adapter that has the micro USB plug in it you have a Raspberry Pi computer you're well aware that this is how you power your Raspberry Pi basically or you know Arduino whatever very very common and this works wonderfully as long as what you're powering is 5 volts and no more than 10 watts so stuff that's powered off of a lithium-ion battery is great because lithium-ion batteries are 3.7 volts you know 4.2 volts you can power them and charge them from 5 you're good to go but the thing is that this doesn't solve the problem for larger devices in the house and that's where you know people basically said look we cannot you know if you have a tablet your 10 watts is actually not really enough to charge or run a tablet or a laptop so the USB implementation forum came up with the idea of power delivery which you're starting to see in a bunch of devices basically you can get up to 100 or even 200 watts of power different voltages and it's one plug but the client device not the power supply but the power sink negotiates it tells the supply what how much power how much current how much voltage it needs and then the power delivery device does its best so you can see here for example it's like you know USB 2 really was supposed to be 2.5 watts but really people used it at like you know 5 watts and then USB type C you know you can get up to 5 volts 3 amps you know with 1.2 and then PD which is very common now almost everything is USB PD 100 watts is easy and multiple different voltages which is great if you have devices that have 8.4 volts battery pack so you need 9 or 12 volts to charge them or it's a laptop or it's a monitor something like really needs a huge backlight or a lot of power it needs or it's a pump or something it needs you know up to 100 watts of power you can get that over USB C. One thing to note this is from the CUI blog by the way check out the blog they have a great in the text version of this there's a great blog post about USB PD you cannot I was kind of obvious but I didn't realize it depending on the wattage you need you're going to have to go with it a voltage that will provide up to that much current because you're really best off not trying to draw more than 3 amps over USB type C cable there are fancy cables you can do 5 amps but people don't always have the fancy cable so really do 3 amps which means that you know as you reach 30 watts you can't use 5 volts anymore you have to use like 15 or maybe the higher end of 9 so like just be aware right like the you know if you can't get more than 3 amps if you need 60 watts you need 20 volts to do that and if you get into the higher voltages you need these thick cables for USB C that can carry 5 amps but that said you can in this power adapters and do more than 30 watts anyways but if you get one of those 100 watt power supplies one thing I recommend and I'll that I'm going to show the demo with is we we stock in digikey stocks this little like USB like power throwing star it's really great because it'll tell you whether the voltage was what voltage was negotiated over USB PD it's great for testing because not every you know every device has some you know as you design your device and you have the USB PD sync you want to make sure that it works properly based on what power supplies plugged into because now you know if you're going to be using a power spike this people might plug it into their computer that cannot provide 12 volts or 20 volts it can only provide 5 your device just has to let people know hey I'm not in charge mode I'm you know in low power mode because I'm not getting the full amount or basically somehow communicate but to debug it I recommend one of these little adapters I use them every day and also have an excellent guide that one of our staff creative engineer R&D people wrote up all about USB see this graphic as also by a graphic designer check it out it's on the learning system learn.afer.com just search for USB type C and then let me show off the overhead this demo so okay here is the CUI devices so the thing to note with USB PD is what you want to look at is the output so you know again with us the non-USB PD power supplies is going to say like 5 volt 3 amps or 9 volt 1 amp with this it actually shows multiple voltages and compare this to earlier power supplies where you'd actually have like you sometimes get weirdo connectors with like four pins because you'd get like 5 volts and 12 volts this one provides only one voltage but it can provide any of these so you don't get like 20 volts at 1.5 amps plus 5 volts at 3 amps you have to choose one or the other and the way you choose is again there's this USB C cable on the end so I'm going to do a little bit of a I did a little bit of a hack because it's like I wanted to plug in different things so for example let's say I plug in you know and this is my my USB throwing starch this is the into the adapter and this is going to just visualize what the voltage is that it's getting so this is plugging into a QT PI which requires only 5 volts so you can see the voltage the V plus here is 5.05 so it negotiated 5 volts that's great and then what I wanted to do is I wanted to plug in from last week I showed off these funky cables that can give you that they have a PD sync chip inside of them that will request 20 volts from it so I have a little like USB jack-to-jack adapter so that's why I like got there just like wanted a quick adapter to convert the two so you can plug in this cable and then I have to plug it in and this time you'll see down here on the voltage it says 19.8 so it got 20 volts so basically this cable or your device you plug in the CUI adapter has to negotiate and say hey I want more than 5 volts use a special chip for that there's a lot of companies that make them they're only like a dollar or two but this way you know no matter what gets plugged in it can request the right voltage and if it doesn't get it it will know that didn't get the right voltage so I recommend if you're gonna get this power supply to integrate it debug with this and of course also get a proper USB PD sync chip to go along available and did you key in stock there's two versions one version has a power cable that's a USA you know three prong and one does not so if you're like why is one 25 bucks and one's 20 bucks that $25 one has the USB cable of the power cable that's on a piano