I like carrying around one USBC to C cable for my devices, but I don’t want to carry around a USBC to A cable for other ports. Is there a dongle that takes a USBC cable and converts one end into USBA? I need it to support at least 15W.
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Seems there only in rose gold at the moment, I got a pair of silvers last year and they work exactly as you’d want them to work.
Syntech USB C Female to USB Male Adapter https://amzn.eu/d/gD9GVsX
First thing’s first: all such adapters should be considered evil by default. The only way to make a compliant adapter is with active circuitry in the adapter essentially providing an entirely standalone USB controller interface.
With that being said, here’s an adapter which does exactly that. Back when I researched this topic in October I found that the linked adapter is essentially the only one of its kind on the market right now.
That’s because you looked on Amazon which is a shitty store and their search is terrible.
Monoprice has been selling this for years. https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=35254
No, it’s because I read an expert opinion on the subject: https://old.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/m7rcu5/any_reliable_usbc_female_to_usba_male_adapters_yet/grducjr/
If you hate Amazon you can buy it on the CableCreation website instead.
Yeah, those are CONSIDERABLY bigger than USB A to USB C dongles
Like I said: in order to do it the non-evil way you need to cram in an onboard USB chip. Female USB-C from a Male USB-A plug-in is explicitly not possible to implement in a spec-compliant manner because of the pinouts.
You can brute-force a smaller passive adapter like those online but it’s a devil’s bargain. Nobody targets these janky adapters when designing products. USB-C things will just break without any rhyme or reason because you’re fundamentally breaking the hardware contract and “lying” about the capabilities of your port.
Tbh with how cheap USB chips are these days, you could easily house such an adapter inside the USB A plug. You’d probably lose charging (over 500mA) capabilities, though, because that sounds like something that needs expensive chips.
That said, for some USB cables, you can make a standards compliant cable. You will need a USB C cable with USB 3 capabilities (none of those cheap phone chargers) and no chip. Since the A-to-C cables distinguish themselves by putting resistors of certain values, a plug with the right resistors could downgrade a C-to-C cable with <60W charging capabilities to an A-to-C cable.
If you try to attach such a plug to a cable with a chip capable of negotiating voltages, you’d need some kind of intelligence to maintain feature parity, so that’s a good reason to avoid these things. I believe you can downgrade the cable to a 2.0 cable and retain basic functionality, but you’d sacrifice a lot in the process.
Unless you know the details about the USB and USB power delivery, these adapters are terrible, and that’s why u don’t think they should be sold to consumers. That said, for people who know what they’re doing, they’re fine-ish, though you’d be better off just buying a new cable.
Male A to Male C is abolutely possible. It’s the Male A to Female C adapters which are evil. There is no pinout mapping that will turn an A host into a “real” C host and that’s exactly what a Male A to Female C adapter purports to do.
In any case, if you know what you’re doing then all bets are off the table. Hack away freely because at the end of the day it’s all just copper and bits anyway. With that being said, anyone who knows what they’re doing does not require my permission to… vague gesture know what they’re doing.
