Thanks @Frosty. I hadn’t seen that before. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to have helped. I had the system shut down and unplugged overnight, and just tried again. Same error. Also, no charging light when it’s not powered on. I’ve also tried with each different port, and different USB-C expansion cards, to no avail. Oh, and I’m using the USB-C cable provided with the Framework.
The Framework charger continues to work just fine, of course. I wonder if there’s something weird with the Anker one. Maybe the PD implementation isn’t to spec? I’ll also have to find another USB-C to USB-C cable to try.
So… reading comprehension fail. I blame lack of sleep due to two young kiddos.
Anyway, I mistook what @Frosty quoted as pertaining to the Framework, and not to the charger. Just realized that mistake, and unplugged the charger for 5 minutes. Plugged it back in, hooked up the laptop, and, lo and behold, it’s charging. LED light came on, and when powered on it’s showing a charging status in Windows (albeit with a slow charging indicator, as expected due to the 30W limit on the Anker).
Mystery solved. I mean, mostly. Still don’t know why it was showing up as an audio device. Nevertheless, good to have an alternative for power when the laptop is on my desk.
Possibly the fact that they invent a new docking connector every couple years and have also changed their power connector using non-barrel styles with different pinouts every couple of years as well.
Sure they were reversible… but I challenge you to try plugging in a barrel connector wrong in any orientation.
After having my Framework for about a month, I’m starting to push it more and more and have recently been doing some gaming with it. I have been playing GTA V and I have noticed that the Framework power adapter doesn’t seem to provide enough juice to keep the battery from discharging.
The battery goes down to 95% after about an hour of gaming. I have the DIY edition with the i7 1165, 64GB of RAM and the 1TB WD850 SSD. I was also connected to a 4K display and a secondary 1080p.
I know this is a pretty extreme case, with the CPU and GPU at close to 100% utilization, an almost maxed out configuration and sending data to external displays, but I feel like the charger should have been designed to cope with this kind of scenario, right?
This slight discharge happens on Dell Precision laptops even with 130-180w power supplies because as your battery reaches close to 100% it is harder to “push” more charge in and the battery heats up, not to mention with the high usage you are subjecting it to the system is also adding additional heat, so it is possible that it is halting charging for a bit to let the battery cool down to safe levels before charging it again.
@ImaxinarDM Nice! I got one too. Works great. Like you, I think I’ll keep the FW adapter at home and grab one of the aforementioned (or similar) combo ones for travel
I only use shutdown and hibernate myself, so I only charge the phone while I’m actively using the laptop. It will charge the phone if the laptop is off but I don’t need to do that.
Actually, there is two versions:
the barrel jack ones come shipped with the cord wrapped around like that together with the laptop
the USB-C ones come shipped with the cord tied to the side (and maybe a notion telling you to not wrap the cord like that)
And it make sense because the USB-C ones carry one extra cable (two data instead of one). however as you said everyone do that and as seen Dell had special curves so the cable will not be put in extra stress
However, I recently discovered a reason not to (when using it) is that the charger become EXTREMELY HOT during full load use, and so you must unwrap the cable and peel off the plastic thing so it get maximum cooling
This issue is also not present on the barrel jack unit (both 45W), suggesting that quite a lot of things changed inside.
Yes, but then you won’t have the ground pin. Which is extremely important.
They can invent some proprietary “duck bill” like Apple did (since Apple probably is smart enough to file patent for it), but it also mean it wont be very “repair friendly”.
That make more sense.
You can buy the two plug (the wall plug and the C5 plug) and make your own cord. You can go as far as 5m (make sure the stuff have good quality) or as short as 5cm (make sure the cable wont fray)
You can read about how I Grounded my Dell 45W PD after I discover that they are actually not grounded. bummer.
I will say the compact size of the 65w and 90w USB-C chargers from Dell (and the fact that I think they ARE really grounded, at least the 90w), makes me throw those in my bag more than the barrel plug versions even though I sometimes need the USB-C port for video/data and can’t devote it just to charging.
The GaN chargers (especially from Anker) are a wonderful gift of technology, but regular silicon chargers work fine as long as they meet the requirements.
I’ve actually been wondering about this. Given that some vendors provide it and others don’t, how important is it, and why is there a variance among vendors?
I consider ground to be mandatory for anything above 20W (unless it’s a car adapter, of which you won’t need to care). You can hold your own beliefs.
But, however, I do have the super-beefy PW7015L 65W power bank and I do use that because it does not connect to mains voltage in any way, the circuits are relatively small (and hazard free) and DC-DC converters do not have issues with floating ground planes (even if cheap DC-DC converters have large ripples in output).
But as I said earlier, the framework brick is quite nice since it’s not cumbersome, is USB-C (and a connector, that is) with full range PD (5V to 20V) and have a ground. Yes, the connector is cumbersome but that’s ok because they are connectors so you can remove them before they snap off in your bag
Since many people will have a IEC C5 cable, it would be useful to have an option to add the power adapter sans AC cable. Even if it were the same price it would be good to reduce the wastage.
i have 3 floating around. One of them is from dell and another is a 20 year old one from molex
But usually when you purchase a brick they just give you one since those things are a) not expensive and b) highly useful so there’s no reason to send one to a landfill.
