Comment by josephg
1 day ago
Yeah this is right. I bought a cheap wireless mouse, with a USB-C port for charging. None of the USB-C chargers in my house would charge it, so after awhile it inevitably went flat and I took it back to the shop - since it was faulty.
The guy in the shop plugged it in to a USB-A port via a cheap A-to-C cable, and the mouse immediately came to life. Of course. I felt like an idiot.
I didn't get a faulty unit. Whoever designed the mouse was treating the USB-C plug like a newer micro-usb port. The mouse just expected 5V over the port. They clearly didn't bother testing it with a proper USB-C charger.
I returned it anyway and got a mouse that wasn't broken.
Something I've also see some shitty peripherals do is only hook up one side of the USB-C connectors. To get it charging, you'd need to orient the cable right.
Absolutely baffling, but it only happened to me for brands where I should've figured.
It annoys me so much when new electronics do this because the fix is both well known by now and only requires 2 dirt cheap components on the circuit board (5.1k resistors to ground on the CC lines).
As a hardware engineer among other things, that was one of the first things I learned about interfacing with USB C. How do so many consumer devices keep getting this wrong in the year of our lord 2026?
I had a bike light that charged over USB-C. I thought I was going nuts when I couldn’t charge it with any combination of cables and chargers I had. That is until I dug up the cable that came with it, a cheap looking yellow USB-A to USB-C cable. With that cable, I could charge it from anything.