08-09-2020, 11:00 PM
(08-06-2020, 04:13 PM)lot378 Wrote: The reason Pine probably included both in the design may be because they have a mountain of barrel-jack power supplies and getting in USB-C PD power supplies to provide with the PBP would have been very expensive and not reduced the size of the barrel-jack power supply mountain.
After researching the PBP's charging logic a bit, which can be read about in another thread, I can only confirm the above statement.
The primary way for powering the PBP is through the barrel plug, and the support for USB PD (Type-C chargers) was just slapped on (i.e., botched) as an additional low-cost feature. Only the basics of the USB PD were used. Even the powering through the barrel jack was somewhat botched, as 3 A at 5 V simply isn't enough to power the PBP in many cases, which causes unnecessary battery drain when connected to wall power, which is both bad and absurd from any standpoint, IMHO.
Why was it done that way? I can't know for sure, but the $200 price point had to do much with that. Most probably, Pine64 has a ton of low-cost 3 A/5 V "barrel-style" power supplies that are used for their other SBCs, and that was probably the deciding factor. Implementing full support for USB PD and supplying 30 W Type-C chargers with PBPs would increase the unit price a lot. Even supplying PBP-specific 5 A/5 V "barrel-style" power supplies, which would provide adequate power, would probably increase the price.
Please, don't get me wrong, I really love what Pine64 does. They try to provide as much hardware as possible for one's hard-earned cash. However, the above-described unfortunate decisions about the PBP's input power turned it from an awesome to into an almost unusable product.
Let's hope that the v2.2 (or whichever) revision of the PineBook Pro motherboard will introduce the necessary improvements.
