DC-id

What is an Adapter?

Quote from EPA, full article here:

External power adapters, also known as power supplies or battery chargers, convert high voltage ac electricity from the wall outlet to the low voltage dc power used to power electronic products, like MP3 players, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), camcorders, digital cameras, laptops, and cordless and mobile phones. On average, 5-10 adapters are used in the typical US home and more than 1 billion new adapters are shipped worldwide each year.

Note: The emphasis is ours.

What other people think?

'Another example [slide of a pile of adapters and cords]: these are the power adapters just lying around our office. I'm sure most of you have things like this under your desk too. It's a real hazard. You could electrocute yourself - if one in a million adapters catches fire and you have a thousand adapters, it starts to be an issue. And it's also a big hassle for the manufacturers because every one of those devices now has this thing that's in the box that's specific to a country. And so they have to repackage the boxes and maintain stock for different countries. It's just silly, and also really inefficient, because guess what? They are sort of subsidized by the devices you buy, so people try to provide the cheapest ones possible. So they all suck power.

Why not instead standardize the power and have a basic [adapter device] so you can say, "I want 12 volts, 2 amps, give it to me." Then you can buy a really nice power supply that's really efficient, really small, is appropriate to the country you're in, and the consumer can pay for it instead of the device manufacturer so they'll have higher margins. Then we don't have that mess of cords. either. So I think we really, really do need standards in these areas.'

From 2006 CES key-note of Larry Page, co-founder of Google; full transcript here.

While we do don't share his views about a unique 12V distribution system for all devices - from technical and economical reasons - we are in agreement that countless power adapters for low power electronic devices are a big problem not only for the user and the environment but also for the manufacturer. We understand his frustration and we know that DC-id is the answer to the problem just quoted.

"Universal" power supplies today?

If you are out of luck and need an extra adapter, you can look today at one of these solutions:

"Universal" adapter, 3, 4.5, 6, 7.5, 9 and 12V	"Universal" adapter, 3, 3.3, 5, 6, 6.5, or 7V
"Universal" adapter for car use, 3, 4.5, 6, 7.5, 9, or 12V	Inverter to be used with 12V input

All of them work - if you're lucky enough to find the voltage/current needed by your application!

We are especially fond of the inverter solution; that is an engineering "marvell". Think just for a sec: you get 12V DC [from your car], spend a lot of resources and loose energy to convert it to 110/220V AC so you'll be able to use your mp3 player/camcoder/etc AC adapter to convert it back to 4.5V (or 5.1 or 5.7, etc) DC. That must be a safe and cheap solution!

All this implementations are not only cost uneffective; they are also not user friendly: one needs to figure out proper voltage, current and power ratings and after that go to the store and hope to find a matching adapter. And don't forget: polarity matter!
If one tries to use one of these adjustable adapters with more than one device (say, when traveling), he/she needs to remember to adjust the output to the proper setting when changing from one device to the other. 

For stationary devices (e.g. switches, routers, cordless-phones, etc) one wall wart per device is needed; you can not find today a multioutput DC power supply for consumer devices so you'll end up piling up bricks under your table.

In DC-id world all these problems are non existent because it is just simple as that: Plug-and-power!

Go to DC-id home!