Two weeks ago, the Raspberry Pi 4 was announced and marked a significant upgrade for the credit-card sized, single board computer.
Pi 4 boasted faster processing, 4GB of RAM and quadruple the ports which included a USB-C port for power. All great news for fans of the hobbyist device… except for the fact that the USB-C doesn’t quite work.
Credit: Tech Crunch
Well, technically it does work but only if used with specific cables, like the official Raspberry Pi charger. Apparently what happened was the Raspberry Pi Foundation used its own circuit design which turned out to be non-compliant with certain third-party USB-C chargers.
The Woodward and Bernstein who more specifically scooped Raspberry-gate™ was Tyler Ward, who looked into the design of the port since the Pi’s schematics are all available online.
The kinds of USB-C chargers that WON’T work are “e-marked” – "smart" cables with chips inside that manage a variety of specs and are able to power larger devices, like a USB-C laptop. If one uses any e-marked cable with the Pi 4, it will read as an “Audio Adaptor Accessory” and wont hold a charge.
Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton mea culpa’ed to Tech Republic earlier this week, saying, "A smart charger with an e-marked cable will incorrectly identify the Raspberry Pi 4 as an audio adapter accessory and refuse to provide power."
He also added, "I expect this will be fixed in a future board revision, but for now users will need to apply one of the suggested workarounds. It's surprising this didn't show up in our (quite extensive) field testing program."
This week, the Raspberry Pi Foundation told Ars Technica that the board revision will be available in “the next few months.”
