Measuring Current Through USB Port or Connection

Actually the old 500ma usb standard has been surpassed for many years now. My own Anker panel / Anker battery setup easily surpasses that to about 2A under good sun, as verified by one of the inline volt/ammeter dongles.

The problem is that not all usb cables are wired the same, and there is some cross-wiring / paralelling going on either inside the cable housing or the device case. If that cable does not meet the manufacturer's spec, sometimes they try to be kind by just falling back to the old 500ma usb standard, even if the charger is capable of much more.

In the old days, that meant I had to hack together specially wired "charge only" cables to get the higher output. What I like about Anker is that their "smart iq" usb port makes a very good attempt at doing the logic connections to get that higher charge current with a strange cable. For the most part it works, but some combinations can still be troublesome. Still, it beats me having to cut usb cables apart and rewire them.

So yes, there ARE high speed usb chargers - as long as the cable isn't weird, or the device itself is doing it's own current limiting, you can get a pretty fast charge from a 2.1a port.

I cann't imagine needing this more than once, so here's a cheaper solution... You can just take a spare USB extension cable and peel back the coating like it's a banana. Then hook your multi-meter up like you normally would. Power is red, ground is black.

JoshK wrote: »

I cann't imagine needing this more than once, so here's a cheaper solution... You can just take a spare USB extension cable and peel back the coating like it's a banana. Then hook your multi-meter up like you normally would. Power is red, ground is black.

For freaks like me that might carry a cute tiny import version of a palm-sized Fluke 106, that works too, and is how I used to do it. I got a lot of squirrel-cred that way.

Lose that cable in the woods, and the Anker smart-iq port with any other cable you find laying around might be a more practical solution for those of us that don't take multimeters camping. Or just forget all this and take a big pre-charged 15000mah Anker with you.

The inline usb dongle meters have saved me a lot of frustration too with funky cabling, bad supplies - especially those that overheat, but initially meet spec.