- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
USB was supposed to rule them all but it’s now a mess of standards sharing the same connector. Different speeds, voltage, charging protocols, alt modes, even the number of pins used is variable… For those asking, the thing is available on Kickstarter
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I’m not sure if there’s supposed to be a picture or video but the media doesn’t load for me (both on web and iOS voyager app).
How is this different from existing USB cable testers available from places like Amazon and AliExpress? In reading the description I didn’t see anything that set it apart
Loads for me. It is a video of a small device with a screen. Both ends of a usb-c cable are connected to the device and the screen shows the max power, max data speeds and other information about the cable.
I wouldn’t trust anything sold on kickstarter.
But if someone launches an open hardware version of this on crowd supply, I’d back it
Why? do you think it’s gonna hack your wire or something?
Because there’s a high amount of scams on kickstarter that never deliver. Whereas crowdsupply has a 100% delivery rate
The current funding level remaining is for 69 euros, 78 us dollars. Supposed to include shipping to anywhere in the world from Austria.
Genuine question: in what ways does it differ from what ChargerLab’s existing km003C does, other than a “cable health” percentage? The other functions seem similar to me.
Out of curiosity, is there a reason that this couldn’t be an Android app? I would think that there should be some way to check a cable’s functionality by plugging it into a phone and a computer.
Cable testers can bypass all of the standard driver and USB negotiation bullshit before anything else. I would imagine building a device to manually control when and how the connections are made is much easier than fighting for low level device control on systems like Windows, macOS and Android.
Pretty much. I’m not even sure if regular USB ports can talk to pins individually, let alone test them for shorts.
(thinks out lound…)
If you could force different speeds and different voltages, you can make some guesses as to what the cable might support.
USB packets use CRC checks, so a bad checksum may indicate a speed or physical problem. (Besides stating the obvious, my point is that doing strict checks for each USB mode gives CRC more value.)
I just looked over the source code for libusb (like I knew what I was looking for, or something) and it seems that some of the driver(?) components hook really deep into the kernel. There might be a way to test specific parts of any type of handshake (for dataflow or voltage negotiation) to isolate specific wires that are bad by the process of elimination.
I think my point is that a top-down approach is likely possible, but it’s probabilistic.
It could be, but I imagine the reported capabilities would be limited by the connected devices. So if your phone doesn’t support USB SuperSpeed 80gbit/s, it wouldn’t be detected by the app.
Among other reasons, phones only have 1 USB port.
