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With people demanding more and more of their mobile phones, most people don't see their phones last past the late afternoon after a day of heavy use. If you have an active lifestyle and spend a lot of time in the car for work, the Energear 27W USB-C Car Charger can quickly get your phone or tablet the charge that it needs.
The Energear 27W USB-C Car Charger works with your 12V car's cigarette/DC charge port and has a single USB Type-C connector that can provide 27 watts of charging to your phone or tablet.
The Energear 27W USB-C Car Charger is also special in that it is one of the few car chargers in the market that have been certified by the USB Implementers Forum and bears that USB certification logo on its packaging. This logo shows that this charger meets the USB compliance specs and the USB Type-C port can provide up to 27 watts, and enjoys a high degree of compatibility with other USB certified devices. Note that however this charger actually stopped working which we found out after a while.
The Energear 27W USB-C Car Charger supports two power profiles for charging- 15 watts (5 volts @ 3 amps) and 27 watts (9 volts @ 3 amps).
The packaging contains not only the charger but a 3 ft. USB Type-C to Type-C cable and user manual.
The Energear 27W USB-C Car Charger comes in a small compact form factor that should fit well no matter where your car's DC charge port is located.
The Energear 27W USB-C Car Charger only comes with a single USB Type-C port but has enough power to support all phone and tablet models. If you don't need to charge a tablet but need two USB ports to charge two phones at the same time, Energear also offers the Energear 18W USB-C PD and 12W USB-A Charger.
To have a look at the Energear 27W USB-C Car Charger's power capabilities, we used the USB Power Test App from Granite River Labs with the Granite River Labs USB Power Delivery Compliance C2 Tester to produce the following test results.
The USB Power Test App first negotiates a power contract for every PDO supported by the Energear charger, and increases the load gradually to find the threshold where over current protection (OCP) kicks in and voltage and current start to drop for safety reasons.
The USB Power Test App reports out all the PDO's supported by the Energear charger and their OCP thresholds.
| PDO | VAC | OCP (A) | %OCP | OCP Timeout (sec) | Voltage Drop(V) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PDO#1 Fixed: 5V 3A | 3.34 | 111.3% | 0.4 | 0.11 | |
| PDO#2 Fixed: 9V 3A | 3.33 | 111.2% | 0.4 | 5.07 |
The USB Power Test App from Granite River Labs takes this data to produce an I-V curve which graphically shows the relationship between voltage and current for each PDO. Interestingly unlike most non-PPS chargers, we can observe dramatic current fold-back behavior for the 9V 3A PDO where as the current increases beyond the OCP threshold, the voltage starts to bend down rather than immediately shutting off. In contrast the 5V 3A PDO just shows the voltage immediately shuts off when crossing the OCP threshold.
Using the USB Power Delivery Compliance C2 Tester from Granite River Labs to run just a subset of the full USB Power Delivery compliance test suite, a compliance failure was observed for the Energear 27W USB-C Car Charger even though the charger has been declared as USB-IF certified.
USB-IF High Level Mapping Summary
Sl No
|
Test Category
|
Test Group Description
|
Test Result
|
|---|---|---|---|
1
|
PHY_PRIMARY_TX
|
BMC Physical Layer Transmitter
|
PASS
|
2
|
PHY_PRIMARY_RX
|
BMC Physical Layer Receiver
|
PASS
|
3
|
PHY_PRIMARY_MISC
|
BMC Physical Layer Miscellaneous
|
PASS
|
4
|
PROT_PRIMARY
|
Protocol Specific Primary
|
FAIL
|
5
|
POWER_PRIMARY
|
Power Source/Sink Primary
|
PASS
|
Result Summary
Sl No
|
Test ID
|
Test Name
|
Test Result
|
|---|---|---|---|
1
|
TDA.2.1.1.1
|
TDA.2.1.1.1 BMC PHY TX EYE
|
PASS
|
2
|
TDA.2.1.1.2
|
TDA.2.1.1.2 BMC PHY TX BIT
|
PASS
|
3
|
TDA.2.1.2.2
|
TDA.2.1.2.2 BMC PHY RX INT REJ
|
PASS
|
4
|
TDA.2.1.2.1
|
TDA.2.1.2.1 BMC PHY RX BUSIDL
|
PASS
|
5
|
TDA.2.1.3.1
|
TDA.2.1.3.1 BMC PHY TERM
|
PASS
|
7
|
TDA.2.2.1
|
TDA.2.2.1 BMC PROT SEQ GETCAPS
|
PASS
|
8
|
TDA.2.2.2.1
|
TDA.2.2.2.1 BMC PROT SEQ CHKCAP P PC
|
FAIL
|
9
|
TDA.2.2.2.2
|
TDA.2.2.2.2 BMC PROT SEQ CHKCAP NOMARK P PC
|
PASS
|
13
|
TDA.2.2.7
|
TDA.2.2.7 BMC PROT BIST NOT 5V SRC
|
PASS
|
15
|
TDA.2.2.9
|
TDA.2.2.9 BMC PROT GSC REC
|
PASS
|
16
|
TDA.2.3.1.1
|
TDA.2.3.1.1 POW SRC LOAD P PC
|
PASS
|
17
|
TDA.2.3.2.1
|
TDA.2.3.2.1 POW SRC TRANS P PC
|
PASS
|
BMC Eye Diagram
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Two of these chargers stopped working after a year and a half.
