I have a usb c cable that ends in the two power wires (USB Type C Kabel mit offenem... kaufen bei BerryBase)
(The website is in german)
I connected it to a apple power brick, my pc and a Anker charger. I measured around 2v on the chargers and 0v when connected to my pc. Does anyone know why, to my knowledge it should be 5v? I also cut a usb c to usb a cable and measured the voltages, its 2v on the usb c side and 5v when plugged into the usb a side.
I suspect the power brick can detect that there is no load and is switching off the 5V supply. The 2V is there only to allow the brick to detect if there is any load connected.
Thanks for the quick reply. I was thinking sth like that too. So if a connect a load (my circuit), should it work?
Maybe, provided your circuit provides a high enough load. The charger is expecting a phone or other device to be connected in order to charge it's battery, which might be a larger load than your circuit. You will have to try it to find out.
Can you try a more simple and cheap 5V phone charger? These often do not have smart circuitry which can sense and cut the power, so will provide 5V even with no load.
These were the only usb c chargers I currently have access to. Im now using a usb a charger and its working. I also used a usb c to usb a adapter and connected my new circuit (esp with led strip, so it should pull enough current) and it worked too.
Hi,
A bit of Googling and this may help about USB chargers and type c.
Tom... 
Tht cable is for supplying power TO a USB C device not taking power FROM
I was on that website yesterday (arduino forum is usually the last option for me and I only use it when I cant find anything anywhere else). Where does the website say something directly related to my problem (I couldn’t find anything)? I know some basics about usb and i thought it may be related to there being no connections to cc pins or no chip communicating with the charger, but i was wondering what then is the use case for the cable I have. Thanks for your reply!
(If there is sth you don’t understand in my post please tell me, my english isnt too good.)
You are right about it being related to there being no CC connection.
USB C power delivery is quite different than the old USB 2.0 way.
Ok, I got it to work by using a USB 2.0 charger as the power supply, which is a bit simpler. I now only have a problem with the voltage dropping when the led strip I connected needs a lot of current (it drops by about 1v), but I read this is normal with chargers because they aren‘t indented to used as power supplies, but i don’t know if this is true. I don’t think this is optimal, but it currently works even with the lower voltage, so ill leave it until I found a better solution.
Thanks for you help!
Well if the LEDs need 5A and the charger can only deliver 2.5A, then the voltage will drop.
You also run the risk of burning out the charger or even starting a fire
The leds never used much over 2A when I ran it of my power supply. I have a esp8266 (esp 01), regulator, led and some other components that dont really use power which I don’t think should use much over 150mA. I cut the led strip to a bit less then 1.9m, it was 5m before (60 leds/meter). I calculated the power consumption to be 1500mA at max, assuming the circuit uses 300mA and the old led strip used 3A, which know should be around 1200mA at 40% length. Me charger can supply 2.1A? Did I do / calculate sth wrong?
Its probably caused by my bad cable with high resistance.
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