My next phone will have a USB-C adapter. Currently, my phone and all of my devices are Micro USB (e-book, head phones, Bluetooth speakers, etc.). So, I have tons of Micro cables everywhere – I plan on buying a bunch of Micro female to C male adapters from Monoprice. I know the new phone will charge slowly, etc.
However, there will be times when the available cable is a USB C cable, and I want to be able to go the other way. Monoprice doesn’t seem to have any, but I found something on Amazon.
However, since USB C chargers can be plugged in either was, is there a device safety issue? Seems like half the time, power will be ground and vice versa from the perspective of the Micro USB device. Is that why Monoprice doesn’t carry them? They seem much more rare, and yet, over time as all my cables change to C, I’ll still have to charge my devices.
It’s not that I doubt your source, but this doesn’t make sense to me – USB -A could always deal with a variety of power supplies and power draws. My understanding is that the connected device would negotiate with the power supply to limit how much power it will get. How can that not be the case with USB-C, where the variety of power drawn is larger by an order of magnitude?
This didn’t exactly answer my question – is it possible to make a safe USB-C to Micro-USB adapter?
USB-C polarity is handled by active electronics inside the connector and the symmetrical arrangement of the pins. There is no effect on the downstream device.
Thanks, but those are the exact opposite of what I’m looking for. My initial concern came about because neither Monoprice nor AmazonBasics seem to make what I’m trying to get.
Sorry, I misinterpreted. The opposite type of adapter is officially frowned upon by the USB Implementer’s Forum because there’s too many invalid combinations possible with a female USB-C adapter, but there’s no physical reason it can’t be made and some vendors do make one. They are theoretically no different from a USB-C male to microUSB-B male cable. It could be made to work OK if you are careful to manually check the power supply requirements of the device with regard to power supply capacity, but nonetheless some USB-C power supplies may refuse to deliver power because it’s not seeing the expected power negotiation signals.
The article Jasmine linked is talking about something else. There were low-quality cables floating around that could not handle high-current USB Power Delivery applications and did not contain the signaling resistor wiring (note that they are not “current limiting” resistors in the proper electronics sense of the term) to indicate they were not fully compliant with USB-PD requirements.