Quick Review: HW-443 CH224K-based USB-C PD Trigger Board

When it comes to power supplies, USB-C PD is now so universal that it makes sense to convert many other things to use USB-C PD to benefit from all the low-cost chargers/power supplies and power banks. The most straightforward way to do this would be to buy a replacement USB-C PD to barrel jack cable, but sometimes where there are custom requirements, you’re better off building your own using a USB-C PD trigger (or decoy) board. In a rush to get a few things built, I opted to cheap out and buy some generic “HW-443” boards because they were cheap and available … so let’s see what they were like. Unbagging The modules are packed in a sealed static shielding bag. For convenience, the module has a USB-C input, a three-bit DIP switch for configuration and a two-position terminal block for connecting the output without the need for any soldering. It’s quite a compact design compared to some of the other decoy boards I’ve used before . The board is labelled HW-443 PDSink <303PDSinkC1>. The solution is built around the WinChipHead CH224K . One upside of this solution is that it can work for legacy fast-charging protocols as well (I suspect this means Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0, but the datasheet is scant on details). It seems likely that USB-C socket has been soldered using a paste-in-pad/pin-in-paste technique, but it seems that whatever solder paste and flux they’ve used has resulted in a fine smattering of solder balls. Not the best. Implementation A look at the datasheet examples seems to show that this board complies with the datasheet in terms of implementation, with the addition of a red indicator LED and a 10k-ohm resistor. The three-bit configuration is as follows: However, it seems that the switches are set such that they are inverted – the “on” position corresponds to shorting the pull-up resistor to ground, hence inputting a zero (as per the truth table). Unfortunately, I couldn’t get any of this to work on USB-C PD! Instead, the result was that the board would…