Intelligent Power Allocation | Get the Most Out of Your Charger

Chiquinho · May 17, 2019, 3:31pm

From time to time I am a very serious one!
But the older you get, the less you be a serious one!

ktkundy · May 17, 2019, 3:33pm

we love your humor though im sure you can be serious when needed but there is no fun in being serious all the time

SpencerJames · May 17, 2019, 3:40pm

Love this innovation by @AnkerOfficial — Intelligent Power Allocation | Get the Most Out of Your Charger Intelligent Power Allocation | Get the Most Out of Your Charger Would love to see them take on the Smart Wallet concept! https://www.volterman.com nearly nailed it, but botched their project with a hideous logo. #UseAnkerInstead

Tweet URL: https://twitter.com/IWGBTP/status/1129411144844808192

SpencerJames · May 17, 2019, 3:43pm

I would much rather have a discreet Anker “A-bolt” in the corner than the woodpecker thing.

Shenoy · May 17, 2019, 4:57pm

Smart Wallet may … may be a good product or design. But most people keep them in trousers’ back pocket and subjected to lot of stress and bends… this may break / damage or also cause some serious incident. I would be surely avoiding smart wallets.

580baby · May 17, 2019, 6:28pm

This is awesome! Thanks for sharing!

The_Bearded_Tech_Guy · May 18, 2019, 2:59am

Neat! Wish it was a bit more smart though…

professor · May 19, 2019, 1:19am

So you can be a lot more intelligent and leverage the fact that PD is a negotiation and that power demands of devices tend to go down.

This is how you can do it:

Have a priority port, I’ll call it port “1”, and a low priority port, I’ll call “2”
To begin, both 1 and 2 are off.
You turn on port 1 when a device is connected, you present all the power to 1 and let the usual PD begin, say it settles on 60W profile.
If you have then any spare Wattage, you then turn on Port 2 and present it the maximum you have remaining, say if 1 has 60W and you have total 60W then 2 never comes on, or if 1 has 60W and you have total 100W, then 2 can begin offering 40W.
As 1 then goes down in demand - e.g. laptop is at/near fully charged, or powered off, you then turn off port 2 and turn it back on with whatever is now your higher spare budget, so say a 60W charger was all 60W on 1 and 0W on 2, and then 1 drops to needing only 45W so now you turn on 2 with 15W.
This then scales to a 3 or 4 port, each getting whatever Wattage is not used by the 1,2 ports.

In this manner you can:

get all Wattage available used if sufficient devices want it
you can intelligent use total Wattage to power devices and charge their batteries and batteries which charge batteries then be given the balance of unused power.
Example is a laptop needing 45W when recharging, and say 30W when fully charged, it is using 30W to operate its electronics and 15W to recharge its internal battery, and say a 30W Powercore. Say your total charger Wattage is 60W, so initially the user would plug laptop into 1 and it takes 45W initially, for a few hours, and the Powercore in 2 gets therefore only 15W, charging slower than maximum, but that is better as the laptop’s battery is best charged first more than the Powercore as battery-charge-battery loses 20%+ of energy in conversion heat. Then as the laptop gets at/near fully charged, it drops its demand from 45W to 30W, then you can present the Powercore with 30W and it then begins charging at full speed, and later itself it will drop its demands below 30W and so if the laptop on 1 needed more, say it was disconnected, ran on battery, reconnected to 1, would then be able to get 45W again as later the 2 Powercore is later only needing 15W anyway.
The consumer would obviously want to buy a powerful charger for all devices, but not necessarily the numeric sum of all the peak demands as most of the time at least one device is in trickle charge mode - less than max requirement.

This is not remotely difficult for Anker, it is in fact very easy.

number the ports to be priority, 1,2, 3…
Turn off power to a port and turn it on, in sequence, delayed, 1 … wait…2…wait… 3… calculating what budget remains and offering it in turn down through 1, 2, 3…
The consumer buys the biggest charger, at the appropriately higher cost for higher Wattage, to suit their personal preference for total Wattage, e.g. someone wanting the fastest possible charge for all devices will buy the biggest most expensive, someone wanting a balanced middle Wattage middle cost will pick lower.
The consumer needs to understand that if a device’s power requirements go up after connecting, they may not get their maximum charge, you could address this by say every 30 mins or so turn off all ports and go back through the same logic above, give 1 right of first refusal then 2 then 3 then…

I recommend for 2019/20 you have all these have 1 Type A port for legacy, up to 10W, and the rest all PD.

For 2020/21 once Anker has a full set of PD products (Powercore, Soundcore, etc) you could probably witness the legacy ports products not needed and you can drop the Type A port.

This intelligent idea, it appears to your consumer as:

A range of size and cost of chargers. Call it the Anker Professor range.
You have 30, 45, 60, 100W versions, different size and cost.
Customer sees numbered ports, 1, 2, 3…
Customer sees they plug in multiple devices into 1, 2, 3 …
Customer sees power come to device plug into 1 first… 2 3 … does not come on initially even though devices connected
After a few seconds (1 has negotiated to its maximum Wattage) then consumer sees 2 come on (3… not on yet, and sees it get the maximum Wattage remaining).
After a few seconds (2 has negotiated maximum it can take) if there is any spare Wattage remaining (more likely the bigger the charger they bought) then 3 comes on.
After a few seconds then if any other ports exist, they come on…

Anker Professor customer buys:

Say an Anker Professor 100W and an Anker Professor 45W, these are for office and travel needs.
Buys an Anker Professor Powercore 26800 30W
Consumer then leaves home on a long trip with the Anker Professor 45W and the Anker Professor Powercore 26800 30W
Consumer drains their laptop through the day, then connects the Anker Professor Powercore 26800 30W to laptop to keep it going
Consumer is in airport lounge at connecting flight, plugs in their Anker Professor 45W, their Anker Professor 26800 30W. Consumer sees their laptop recharge quickly, their Powercore does not initially begin to charge, then later does begin to charge.
Consumer then gets to hotel, plugs in their Anker Professor 45W, to laptop and to Anker Professor 26800 30W and goes to sleep, and wakes to fully charged laptop and fully charged Anker Professor 26800 30W and so repeats their day, having sufficient power to last the full day and makes best use of any time near any wall sockets.
Consumer notices every 30 mins or so, all the power is dropped and then the laptop sees power then the Powercore sees power, does not understand as the Professors is “sniffing” out that 1 is getting all it wants then 2 gets all it wants which is available, 3… etc.

I thank you.

Variations to consider:

a specific low power port for basically soundbuds. These are never high Wattage but need elapsed time to slowly recharge
if this port has a connected device, give it a low power, like say 5W and subtract 5W from your total calculation before you then do port 1,2,3…
so then you have ports 1, 3… T “Trickle” and tell users to plug in laptops to 1, Powercore to 2 and buds to T.
the consumer still gets the maximum ingest of energy across all their devices, their laptop which can eat ingress energy fastest to its biggest battery gets first refusal, the Powercore gets whats available after the laptop (sensible as recharging batteries to then later recharge batteries wastes energy) and their buds get recharged.

I expect most people will end up on 3 or 4 ports, their “big main device”, the “smaller secondary” and their audio.

e.g. laptop, phone, buds
laptop, Powercore, buds.
laptop, phone, Powercore, buds
phone, Powercore, buds (this one numerically most common as most Anker customers only own a phone and a battery and buds).

So it would make sense for the bigger Wattage to be 4 ports, smaller say 2 to 3 ports. Personally the magic number for me is 3, laptop, phone, buds.

TechMan · May 19, 2019, 1:00am

Woahhh. That’s the longest post I’ve seen yet

professor · May 19, 2019, 1:13am

See a doctor, before the Alzheimer’s makes you unsafe to drive. Here’s my last one. I’ll keep trying to raise Anker’s ambitions before I’m cookoo myself.