pretty much everyone agrees that the convenience of having one USBC power
adapter for all of your devices is a good thing but what about the year's
worth of gadgets we've accumulated that don't support USBC there's a solution
for that to demonstrate we are going to take all of these retro consoles and
bring them into the 21st century using Gan Chargers with USBC from ugreen who
sponsored this video no more bulky power adapters no more cable clutter no more
struggling to find Reliable Replacements and what's really cool is that you can
do this on just about any device that accepts DC power even if it has a barrel
plug we're talking monitors laptops routers neck massagers electronic dogs
small fans external hard drive security cameras picture frames Network switches
electronic dog garage door sensors Networks
USBC is understandably confusing there are multiple standards for data multiple
standards for power cross compatibility that works except when it doesn't except
when it does but unofficially and we endure this because ultimately it's
still a lot better than the alternative
the focus of today's video USB PD or
power delivery is just such a perfect example of this because some of its
features are optional it's common to run into products that support USB PD but
not all of USB PD more on that later for
now let's talk about how it's supposed to work because it's really really cool
out of a single wall adapter and cable you can get output from 5 to 20 volts
even 48 volts on the latest version and you don't have to worry about getting
the voltage wrong because it just figures out what your device needs when
you plug it in like magic right no not
like magic magic isn't real and magicians are Shifty swindlers who steal
your ear quarters what we need here then is science in
order to determine the correct voltage a handshake process takes place between
your charger and your device the charger says hey how many volts do you want I've
Got 5 9 15 and 20 and the device says
I'll have 9 volts please they synchronize their watches and Shake
Hands completing their electric ritual but these old devices are to continue
our handshake analogy completely handless they have none of the requisite
circuitry to respond to our charger's inquiry so how do we give them a hand
well 5 volt is easy if your wall adapter
detects a certain resistance along the two configuration pins it'll just send
back 5 volts so two resistors on a USBC
Port is enough to get you going if you want any higher voltage though you're
going to need some kind of logic board luckily unlike some competing standards
like Qualcomm quick charge USB PD is royalty free so these boards are
plentiful and cheap and it is an open standard so you could even build your
own to suit your needs and it gets even better these boards can be so small that
they will fit inside the plug housing of an otherwise normal looking cable like
this one which is going to be extremely helpful for our use case the NES super
famicom and Sega Genesis all use 5.5 by
2.1 millimeter Barrel Jacks the worldwide Super Nintendo used a larger
Jack for whatever reason I don't know Nintendo logic probably so if you have
one of those you'll need this inexpensive adapter from console 5. with
that out of the way these three consoles all use 9 to 10 volt input power and at
most one and a half amps of current meaning that a solution for one should
be a solution for all but wait there's a
bit of variance in their power requirements is that legal actually yes
if we look inside these consoles not too
far from the power input we'll find the venerable 7805 voltage regulator 78 is
the series and o5 is the number of bolts that it outputs and this bad boy which
has actually been in production for over 50 years can accept input power from
around 8 volts all the way up to around 12 volts usually or sometimes even as
high as 20 volts if it has a beefy enough heat sink but then hold on a
second this raises the question if all the power for the internals is 5 volt
anyway why not just remove the regulator and then run 5 volt USB power directly
into the system you actually can do that but you'll need to take some extra
precautions a 5 volt USB power adapter can actually output anywhere from 4.4 to
5.2 volt while still being within spec
and perhaps more importantly that output voltage will fluctuate slightly because
of the conversion from AC current this fluctuation is called Ripple and it is
bad for your old electronics so you'd want a step up step down converter like
this one if you want to go that route we're not going that route we're going
to take a walk down easy street with one of those cables I showed you before these cost just a few dollars from
Adafruit and use a built-in chip to request 9 volts from our USB PD wall
adapter which will certainly be enough for these consoles regardless of what
their original Power bricks might normally provide
Gan power adapter not only smaller but it actually has two ports and it'll do a
12 this is probably 45 Watts hey yep do a total of 45 Watts no movie Magic guys
we're going straight out of that wall wart into this NES
the power of this bad boy up shut up shut the front door
sick
don't play too long no no I gotta win the whole game yeah oh damn it get it
together man get it together the people are expecting better from you I need the
flute no
no it's the first level the coolest thing about this is not only that we got
rid of that giant sketchy power adapter but that we're actually able to plug in
two consoles to a single power adapter
and remember when I said Power delivery has
some flaws well it's extremely common
for PD Chargers especially compact Gan
Chargers to pause power to their already connected devices when a new one gets
plugged in they then perform a fresh handshake with every connected device so
you can see this in action yeah short pause and power and it's back
to be clear this is a feature not a bug it helps ensure that you can't ask a
charger to Output more than its capabilities safety first but it is a
little inconvenient for devices like these that don't have a battery in them
since I lost my spot in the game we might as well swap out this 45 watt
charger so we can power all three of these consoles at once super cool and
it's actually smaller than that crappy adapter that was only able to do one of
these consoles but wait there's more quick note while
this super famicom in Genesis do share a barrel Jack size with the NES and their
power bricks will work with the NES and with each other that comes with a slight
caveat super famicon and Genesis Barrel Jacks are negative polarity so basically
it means the positive and negative are swapped around from where they are on a
typical Barrel Jack for this reason they will not work with these cables unless a
polarity converter is used while discovering this did not damage our
systems yours might not be so lucky you have been warned we've got these these
newer consoles have AC power plugs so you might think surely they're not gonna
yeah we are due to the nature of silicon
transistors AC wall power must be converted to DC so all we need to do is
remove that internal AC to DC power supply and replace it with one that
accepts 12 volt DC power from our wall adapter and converts to the 3.35 and 12
volt juice that our consoles drink conveniently there's a fairly active
community of modders who are building exactly what we need and out of these
ones that we purchased from game Tech us only the N64 one requires any soldering
at all and even then that's only if you want to put it back to stock again now
that they're all installed then they take the same standard Barrel Jack size
that the other three consoles take which is kind of a dangerous thing proceed
with caution here because while they're the same size they are not the same
voltage you might have noticed that when I listed the voltages supported by USB
PD earlier I didn't mention 12 volt specifically that's because while the PD
spec does include support for 12 volt it's not required and a lot of
Manufacturers skip it thankfully since
we're using ugreen nexo Chargers we don't have to worry about that every Gan
charger in their lineup supports 12 volt power delivery but you might say what
about using other cables I mean one of the big selling points of USBC is that
you can use one cable for a ton of different things and just plug that type
c connector into everything well on these modded consoles you could achieve
that by removing the barrel Jack and then installing a trigger board there
are some resources online for 3D printing a triggerboard but that
requires soldering and it's just easier if we find an alternative method the N64
in particular has a lot of room for activities in its giant removable power
supply so this is a panel Mount USBC
Port just plug a cable into one end plug in a cable to the other end and it's
done you just have to drill some holes tape up or shrink wrap the metal parts
to keep them from shorting when it's jostled and install and now everything
is running off of USBC
we know this isn't everything
enough we need everything running off of USBC
monitors typically use anywhere from 12 to 20 volt power boom USBC network
switch done this thing USBC okay
everything is Type C now so why don't I feel complete
probably because I haven't told you this message from our sponsor
ugreen provided all of the power adapters and sponsored this video and
they've got huge black Friday discounts that you guys are going to want to check
out down below if you're not convinced yet and you want to see even more
reasons why you should type CFI everything check out that time we made
James manually plug USB cables in over
and over again to test their durability USBC ended up being really awesome