Volker.Berlin
Member
Main use is charging phones, MP3 players, compact cameras and tablet computers. When travelling with two adults and two teens, there's a lot of gear that needs USB juice!
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Specs change: 07/11
- Thread starter Jeroens
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- Model S User Interface
Volker.Berlin
Member
No because the main use of USB in my car is charging electronic gear. Every USB port only offers a limited amount of juice, and that doesn't double when you put a (passive) USB splitter between the port and your device.
Besides I can't stand having yet another cable flying about in the car. Why not simply have 5 USB ports instead of 2 and be done with it? It's almost as cheap a adding storage.
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Correct, but you can get 12V powered USB hubs.
Agreed, although I suspect that it's the time to run the cables that nixed the additional ports rather than the cost of the ports themselves.
Volker.Berlin
Member
That's how I currently solve it. I was looking forward to some improvement... *sigh*
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Volker.Berlin
Member
Just get a dual USB charger for the 12V port.
Hq cigarette lighter DUAL USB CAR CHARGER WITH 12V: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics
Oh yeah, I am an avid Plex user, that would be amazing especially if 4g were made available.
scottf200
Well-Known Member
It seems most cars/PCs are limited to the USB 2 ports to supply 5 volts at 500ma.
From another thread of mine:
While my son was driving our Volt, I was using my phone (RAZR-MAXX-HD) when it was pretty low (7%). I plugged it into the USB connector in the arm rest. I noticed that while it indicated it was charging it could not quite keep up with the phones charging needs. In fact the charge dropped and the phone ended up powering down. Mind you I was doing several things on the phone.
Out of curiosity I wondered if that USB had limited power. I bought a 'USB port voltage current tester' and did some test. I compared it to charging in my house and to using a Dynex 12v to USB charger in all of the 12v ports in the car. Here is the results.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AplA7Kfp45ULdGlpOFFSdEZzdko2WTlnNGR6cjgwMWc
The USB spec is 500mA per port unless the port supports the USB charging spec which allows up to 2 amps (10w).
It seems most cars/PCs are limited to the USB 2 ports to supply 5 volts at 500ma.
From another thread of mine:
While my son was driving our Volt, I was using my phone (RAZR-MAXX-HD) when it was pretty low (7%). I plugged it into the USB connector in the arm rest. I noticed that while it indicated it was charging it could not quite keep up with the phones charging needs. In fact the charge dropped and the phone ended up powering down. Mind you I was doing several things on the phone.
Out of curiosity I wondered if that USB had limited power. I bought a 'USB port voltage current tester' and did some test. I compared it to charging in my house and to using a Dynex 12v to USB charger in all of the 12v ports in the car. Here is the results.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AplA7Kfp45ULdGlpOFFSdEZzdko2WTlnNGR6cjgwMWc
Rowlock
Member
I'd be interested to see actual measured specs from the Tesla ports.
When I took delivery, the specialist explicitly told me that we have charging-spec 2 amp ports to support tablets, etc. But my experience of actually charging phones in the car so far suggests that they might indeed be 500 milliamp ports.
Does anyone have the gear to measure it definitively?
When I took delivery, the specialist explicitly told me that we have charging-spec 2 amp ports to support tablets, etc. But my experience of actually charging phones in the car so far suggests that they might indeed be 500 milliamp ports.
Does anyone have the gear to measure it definitively?
I don't have anything really to measure the ports (except a multi-meter). But everything that I have plugged in (half a dozen smart phones, iPad, Flashlight, camera, other stuff) only charges at 500mA.
As far as I'm concerned, if this is actually their plan (to eliminate USB music storage), and if it's in favor of caching Google maps, then I would be okay with that. But, I sort of doubt it, because the car was advertised as having that feature, and in particular greater song storage was one of the selling features of the premium audio system. It seems more like some of the other changes that Tesla made to have their site reflect current reality until they actually had the feature available.
If they do actually plan to remove the feature, then that needs to be clearly communicated to current owners. I'm sure I can't be the only one who has not bought a USB stick because he's waiting for the storage in the car to become available.
On the subject of using the USB ports in the car for charging, they don't seem to work for iPads. They don't provide enough juice, and my iPad just reports that it is not charging. I bought a nice, low-profile Belkin dual-USB 12V plug that also came with a handy Lightning connector that fits my iPad Mini. Works great, and provides lots of charging power. Plus the USB ports in the car remain free for music.
If they do actually plan to remove the feature, then that needs to be clearly communicated to current owners. I'm sure I can't be the only one who has not bought a USB stick because he's waiting for the storage in the car to become available.
On the subject of using the USB ports in the car for charging, they don't seem to work for iPads. They don't provide enough juice, and my iPad just reports that it is not charging. I bought a nice, low-profile Belkin dual-USB 12V plug that also came with a handy Lightning connector that fits my iPad Mini. Works great, and provides lots of charging power. Plus the USB ports in the car remain free for music.
Briefly regarding iPad power: an iPad will receive 500 mA via the standard USB port. When the iPad is asleep it will charge albeit slowly at 1/4 of its usual rate. When it's awake it doesn't get enough power for the screen, CPU and charging so it reports "Not charging". Depending on the load it may not use any battery power or use some, but less than if it wasn't plugged in.
The catch is that one can't tell that it's charging because it needs to wake up to display that. Charging while asleep can still be verified by following the charge percentage over time. Just to dispel the misconception that the USB port isn't working for iPads at all.
Remember that there's two halves to the problem:
- How much power is actually available (set by the current limit chip/polyfuse or whatever safety protection strategy they have chosen). It's not unusual for this to be shared between ports - so there might be 1A (or 2A or ...) shared
between the ports.
- Signalling to tell the phone (or whatever) how much power it can draw. Ports that only support charging re-use the connector pins that would normally carry data to signal the available power with a set of resistors - and there's various proprietary systems (notably Apple's) pre-dating the official USB standards. Ports that are capable of data are supposed to signal the available current via software.
Since Tesla's ports are obviously not dedicated charging ports, the charging rate should be set by software. Mechanisms for values above 500mA are relatively new, so it's entirely possible the ports have support for more than 500mA but the software does not enable it.
If you are willing to bend the rules, it's easy enough to modify a standard USB cable into a charging-only one and fake up the data pins to cause it to draw more power. For a lot of devices (not Apple ones) a cable that shorts D+ to D- at the phone end and leaves those pins unconnected at the host end is both useful and easy to make (open the outer sheath with a scalpel; leave the (fatter) power wires untouched, cut the other two wires and join together the ends leading towards the phone, leaving the other cut ends unconnected). Since this has no added components, you can make it with a very neat splice. For Apple devices you'd want the resistors, so a slightly fatter splice needed (and a more expensive cable to sacrifice!).
They can't implement a graphical front end to "cp"?
I was hoping to be able to store stuff on the internal car memory myself too.
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