How do plugs like USB type c and apple’s lightning cable go into the port in any orientation?

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How does the positive and negative work? How doesn’t it kill the device? etc

In: Technology

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I worked with usbc

The answer is that literally you have double the connections you need for certain things. The connection uses differential signals which don’t care about the orientation.

Usbc does know the orientation of the connection. An example is analog audio over usbc (supported by some Android phones).

I personally worked on hardware and software that determined the orientation of the connector and configured switches to get the signals in the correct place.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Symmetry. Male side has 2 sets of the same terminals and the female side only has one. You’re only ever using one side of the connector

Anonymous 0 Comments

The pins on the upper and lower side of the connector are rotational identically. They only different on rx or tx. Then there’s a pin that detects the orientation and the controller handles switching the rx/tx if need be.

Traditional connectors need rx on one side to connect to tx on the other side. Now if rx connects to rx, the controller switches its rx to tx.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The top side will be ABCD while the bottom side is DCBA. that way, no matter which way it’s flipped, it will always be ABCD/DCBA. (I’m sure there are more technical explanations for this)