SparkFun Power Delivery Board - USB-C (Qwiic) Effectively Manage Power Distribution Achieve Higher voltages 5-20V Up to 100W of Power Output Current up to 5A Reversible USB-C Connection No Soldering

In basic USB-PD, the power source tells the power sink — this board — “I supply up to 5V@3A, 9V@3A, [email protected], 15V@2A, or [email protected]; pick one.” This board is great at managing that. To fast-charge a phone battery pack, your phone needs to carry around the electronics to convert 12V@2A to varying voltage/constant current for each cell. Worse, the voltage/current converter circuitry creates heat itself, next to the battery. High battery temperature limits charge speed, which was the whole problem in the first place. Modern USB-PD power sources may include a feature called PPS, which advertises “I can supply 4.50V–12.00V at up to 3.00A; tell me the precise voltage you want, and update me as it changes.” That moves fine control over charge power from the phone to the source, which can heat up all it wants, without heating the battery. 30W chargers with PPS are much cheaper than this board. And there would be a *lot* of uses for those PPD chargers — everything from benchtop power supplies, to continuously-variable-speed fan/pump control to lighting. You just need a board which speaks PPS. Foolishly, I assumed SparkFun had picked a USB-PD chip which speaks PPS, because why make an expensive, configurable board but omit that feature? Probably because this is an old board and chip, from before PPS standardization. Today, you can get fixed-configuration 5/9/12/15/20V “USB-PD to pigtail” adapters for a fraction of this board’s price. So read the datasheet first, and make sure this board solves your problem better than a fixed-voltage USB-PD adapter.