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Life & fun · August 5, 2026

WB

We built an open USB-C Power Delivery analyzer and programmable sink

Title: Show HN: We built an open USB-C Power Delivery analyzer and programmable sink Hi HN! We’re Arbi, Marco, and Rob, and we built Dr. PD to make USB-C power problems easier to understand. It sits between a power source and device, captures and decodes their USB-PD negotiation, and correlates it with voltage and current measurements. It can also act as a programmable sink, with support for fixed supplies, PPS, AVS, and USB-PD 3.2 EPR up to 240 W. Commercial USB-PD analyzers are often priced beyond the reach of hobbyists and independent designers. We are on a mission to make high-quality…

What it does

In the maker’s words, at launch

Title: Show HN: We built an open USB-C Power Delivery analyzer and programmable sink Hi HN! We’re Arbi, Marco, and Rob, and we built Dr. PD to make USB-C power problems easier to understand. It sits between a power source and device, captures and decodes their USB-PD negotiation, and correlates it with voltage and current measurements. It can also act as a programmable sink, with support for fixed supplies, PPS, AVS, and USB-PD 3.2 EPR up to 240 W. Commercial USB-PD analyzers are often priced beyond the reach of hobbyists and independent designers. We are on a mission to make high-quality test equipment more accessible. Dr. PD’s hardware, firmware, software, libraries, and documentation are all open source. Hardware and software are ready, and all the source and design files are available on our GitHub repo [1]. We’re also preparing to launch it through Crowd Supply [2], where you can also sign up to be notified when it becomes available. The host software runs locally in Chrome without drivers, accounts, or cloud services. Dr. PD also supports SCPI over USBTMC, Python and JavaScript libraries, capture export, and external oscilloscope synchronization. We have a full set of documentation [3], which includes a user guide, programming references, interactive schematics, and detailed hardware design notes. Happy to answer all your questions! You can also reach us at [email protected]. [1] https://github.com/T76-org/drpd [2] https://www.crowdsupply.com/t76-org/dr-pd [3] https://t76.org/drpd/docs

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