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eqvinox • today at 3:02 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

Yes, yes :). I was really joking with the 7 pins.

It would be amazing though to make it a hermaphroditic 4 or 6pin connector. With a pinout like this:

  GND TX [VrefTX VrefRX] RX GND
So it always plugs at a 180° rotation, connecting RX to TX. And any cable also rotates 180°. Since you always have an odd total of (connections + cables), you always get the right connection...

Replies

murderfs • today at 8:35 AM

Better yet, you could add more pins and switch them to using differential pairs to make it extensible for more use cases. While you're at it, you could have pins on both the top and bottom of the connector, and use a pair of sense pins to detect orientation, so that super specialized use cases can use every single pin available on the connector.

  GND TX1+ TX1- VBUS CC1  D+   D-   SBU1 VBUS RX2- RX2+ GND
  GND RX1+ RX1- VBUS SBU2 D-   D+   CC2  VBUS TX2- TX2+ GND
If only you could buy receptacles for this for like five cents a pop...

(If you do this, make sure that you don't send more than 3.3ish V over a pin, and that you're tolerant of 3.3V incoming, so that you don't explode yourself or victim devices if people randomly plug you into things. https://github.com/google/usb-cereal is a reference design for a UART over USB-C SBU adapter used for Pixel phones)

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