Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Thursday 10 May 2007, 11:06 AM
I don't normally reward spam, but...
"I am foreign sales representative of TinyPlug Technology Ltd (www.tinyplug.com.cn). I have browse your website, knowing you are dealing with the business of such kind of production. Now, I introduce our latest TinyPlug Charger to you, which has passed the CE, UL, Rohs and CEC certifications. World’s Smallest Wall Plug, Charge up the cool life!"
First, the name. You're making tiny plugs, you call yourself TinyPlug. Top marks. It would have been too easy to call yourself Joose or Convertrix or hugaplugable. Tell it like it is.
Second, the product. They make tiny power adaptors. Given the eternal pain of trying to jam huge great black bricks into power strips, having them fall out through gravity or awkward positioning, the idea of making the converters the same size as the standard plugs that the sockets are designed to accept is nothing short of genius. This alone redeems the spam.
Third: the slogan. Charge up the cool life. I'm sold.
But we need to go further. We need one adaptor that plugs into any sort of product - at least within reasonable limits. And we're so close. If the electronics industry was serious about making our lives easier (a very big if), it should set about making a single standard for all gizmos. One size fits all.
Of course, different gizmos need different voltages. That's OK. The standard just has to say that everything which has an external power input has to have circuitry that can communicate down the wire to the power supply and tell the power supply what voltage and current are required. There's a bit of a bootstrap issue - how do you power that circuitry? - but it's simple to have a two-stage process.
Universal power supply provides five volts at a handful of milliamps as default; the circuitry in the gizmo runs at five volts, and once the communication has been confirmed and the right requirements dialled in, the main gizmo is powered up.
Do it in a standard chip, and the extra cost per unit falls to pennies. Add in the free bonus feature of decent power management to reduce consumption in standby or when charging's finished, and the environmental and cost of power savings justify the business many times over. Then think of a life where you never have to worry about finding the right power brick again, or blowing up your expensive toys because you got the wrong identical connector, and...
It's too good to happen.
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