I have 15-20 power adaptors in my house for everything from mobile phones over PDAs to laptops, printers, rechargeable torches, network hubs, scanners and all sort of other things. I have 9 power sockets under my desk and it is not near enough and I have to constantly plug and unplug various adaptors depending on what I want to run or charge.This is an annoyance for me, it must be a costly overhead for electronics manufacturers and it can't be good for the environment.
Most power adaptors work in the same sort of spectrum, usually between 6V and 14V and with a variety of requirements on load.Making one standard power supply is impractical because different appliances have different needs. But what if you could develop a standard where the device could tell the power adaptor what it needs? You would only have one big power adaptor with any number of "ports", each with an individual lead. When that lead is plugged into a device, the device will tell the power adaptor its requirements and the power adaptor will send that current and load down that lead. This wouldn't require any power in the appliance (i.e. if it is completely decharged) as it could be a kind of "responder" thing.
In order for this to work, all electronics manufacturers would need to change their product design to accept this new standard power supply. Bit of a tall order in the short term, not least beause it may have implications for desktop chargers, car kits and so on, so there is an interim solution: You could design a little intermediary adaptor. For example, you could design a little thing that would slot into the power supply on my mobile phone and in the other end have an input for the universal power adaptor and just have the little simple responder that tells the power adaptor the current and load. This is not perfect as I will still end up with multiple devices but at least they are smaller, cheaper and don't occupy a power socket.
The key to this idea is to get industry backing. They would all realise significant cost savings from it so it really should be a no-brainer?
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IMO, your convenience really doesn't count before the bottom line of the electronics manufacturer.
Now, something the manufacturers could do with little cost, is to use particular standard fittings for certain power configurations, and/or standard lableing for the power requirements/polarity and such (unless they have an interest in selling replacement parts though, of course, which they'd do what they can to prevent you from knowing power requirements to fore you to buy theirs.).
Check out http://www.igo.com/. A colleague of mine got one, and now others in the office seem to want one too.
All you need is three wires: - ground - voltage - return
One resister between ground and return.A second resistor between return and voltage.The ratio between the resisters gives the ratio between voltage and return. Theresistors would be large enough to minimize the load on the power supply while still providing enough current for the return.
The goal of the power supply would be to increase the voltage until the return was 1.5 volts.
The ratio would be different for each device.
Pick a new cheap three pin connector. New devices coulduse this. A simple cable adapter could be made for allolder devices.
The power supply still needs to provide a regulator andsmoothing capacitors per output.