I’m traveling out of the country (from USA to EU) and bought a couple converters for my electronic devices (tablet, phone, etc). My question is, can I leave the charging “bricks” with the standard plug at home and use the USB outlets on my converter to charge my devices or will that harm them. I think all it could potentially do is slow the charging on the ones that increase the wattage, but am I missing something? Thanks in advance!
In: Technology
If both devices follow USB protocols, there is no problem – USB is designed so that if you just plug things together, the charger is gonna give 5V and the charged devices is gonna drain some small current – this is slow charging. Anything behind that, the devices have to actually agree on – there is a communication protocol going on, even if the connection is just for charging. So you can plug anything to anything and the devices will settle the situation themselves.
It’s important to remember the qualification I started with though – the devices have to follow the protocol. I have for example an amateur telescope that came with integrated heating, which has a USB connector for some reason – and a huge warning “don’t plug this in your laptop unless you want to use the USB ports on it ever again”. I personally think that the use of USB connector for this is borderline criminal, but some manufacturers have no common sense.
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