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+--- Forum: General Discussion on PinePhone (https://forum.pine64.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=127)
+--- Thread: Is there any risk in plugging the PinePhone into a powered Thunderbolt dock? (/showthread.php?tid=11956)
Is there any risk in plugging the PinePhone into a powered Thunderbolt dock? - Mark53 - 10-26-2020
I have a Dell TB16 dock at work and thought of a use case for it with my Pinephone, but since the Thunderbolt connection is normally used for powering a laptop and replacing a 130W, 19.5V power supply, I'm hesitant to plug it into my phone. This means the phone would have to negotiate the dock down to a supported voltage (if the dock hardware allows it) or reject charging at all.
Is there any realistic chance that this would damage the phone, or should it be fine?
RE: Is there any risk in plugging the PinePhone into a powered Thunderbolt dock? - wibble - 10-27-2020
In theory it shouldn't damage anything. It should be using the USB Power Delivery standard, so shouldn't supply >5V without negotiating it with the device. Having said that it probably won't actually charge - see https://xnux.eu/devices/feature/anx7688.html which has more info on issues with Power Delivery at the moment. I'm not sure how much of what's detailed there has made it into which distros so far.
RE: Is there any risk in plugging the PinePhone into a powered Thunderbolt dock? - Mark53 - 10-27-2020
(10-27-2020, 11:00 AM)wibble Wrote: In theory it shouldn't damage anything. It should be using the USB Power Delivery standard, so shouldn't supply >5V without negotiating it with the device. Having said that it probably won't actually charge - see https://xnux.eu/devices/feature/anx7688.html which has more info on issues with Power Delivery at the moment. I'm not sure how much of what's detailed there has made it into which distros so far.Interesting. I gave it a shot today and it actually did charge the phone, but none of the peripherals connected to the dock worked. I was under the mistaken impression that Thunderbolt was an optional protocol for communicating over USB-C, but it looks like on the TB16 in particular it's the only protocol supported.
I had the chance to try it on a WD19TB dock, which is backward compatible with non-Thunderbolt devices, and on that one the peripherals worked and I got a cursor on the phone screen. There were two monitors connected, one to HDMI and one to DisplayPort, and only the HDMI monitor was detected. Even though it was detected in software, the monitor itself never came out of sleep mode or displayed anything.