Comment by mrlambchop

20 hours ago

A very small point, but pulling from a feather form factor BOM to compare.

$0.12 for microUSB female connector (rated 1A) $0.26 for a USB-C female (rated 3A). Needs 2 x resistors (< $0.01), 20% larger board area

I think the power capabilities are the biggest item. If you want to pull higher current from a laptop for development or supply from a wall, you have to switch to USB-C.

I don't think either of these prices are that aggressive - pretty sure the cost comes down at volume.

9 comments

mrlambchop

Reply
bee_rider  20 hours ago

I wonder if it would be worthwhile for them to produce both. Well, it will be hard to compare because the design cost doesn’t show up in the BOM, haha.

But it seems like it would be useful nowadays, since some laptop have mostly USB-C connectors, and USB-C to USB-C is pretty common. I’ve never seen a C to Micro. Do they even exist?

  • peteforde  20 hours ago

    I have an unfair bias because I design PCBs as a significant part of my job, and switching out to USB on this board appears to be a non-issue.

    I have a Pico in front of me, and there's plenty of room there for a USB-C footprint and the two 5.1k resistors. Given that, I cannot reasonably agree that the "design" stage is significant.

    In other words, it's a change that I would make to my own board in 2-5 minutes because the stakes are low. My ballpark guess is that such a change at RPi would have to go through a proposal stage, a PCB change review, and then there would be dozens of places to update documentation.

    Since backwards compatibility is non-optional, this would result in a separate SKU, which means that the whole distribution chain needs to be updated with a new product.

    So, I acknowledge that when you're working at their scale any change like this is the definition of non-trivial. What I don't agree with is the conclusion that it's not still clearly the right thing to do.

    • asddubs  2 hours ago

      One caveat is that the pico isn't so old that micro usb wasn't a weird choice even when it came out

ozim  18 hours ago

But then you loose market share to ESP32 where people just get USB C on their own.

  • peteforde  7 hours ago

    Comparing an RP2350 to the ESP32 family (which is broad) is very much apples to oranges; they each have feature sets which make them ideal for completely different use cases.