Power Over Data
Delivering power over wired data lines has been one of the most obvious extension to many legacy protocols. It is hard to comprehend why many of these protocols did not have the power option from the beginning, requiring the connected devices to be fed power over a separate line (and a separate cable). Less cables is always good. My own journey with cutting power cables started about 40 years ago when I designed my first commercial product - a software protection dongle. The dongle was using the PC printer port for communication. Unfortunately the printer port never had power lines in it, but I managed to harvest sufficient energy from the data lines. Next in line was USB , and the inclusion of power was a very significant (if not the most significant) contributor to the success of the standard. Now with the Power Delivery (USB-PD) capable of carrying up to 240W of power, the PD is the king of power-over-data standards. HDMI is the one that really failed to do this properly....