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WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do

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Re: WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do

#51

Post by kccqzy »

robot_jesus wrote: post #11

I'm curious if this also works for USB-A to USB-C. The use case: My Suburu has USB-A inputs and only allows wired Carplay. When I upgraded my iPhone and ditched Lightning, I had to try 6 different cables from my cable drawer to find one that supported data transfer. I have so many cables I've accumulated over the years, I should either purge or at least categorize the functionality of each.

For cheap cables like USB-A to USB-C, I just throw away all cables that do not support data transfer. I don’t need the mental overhead of categorizing these cables. So any USB-A to USB-C cable in my cable drawer would work in this scenario. And CarPlay doesn’t even require USB 3.0; 2.0 is enough.

Re: WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do

#52

Post by traceroute66 »

harikb wrote: post #32
traceroute66 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Decent quality cable testers can be had for like $20,000. See the discusison linked to. Trust me, my interest was piqued by that thread and I went down the rabbit warren with Mr Google and spent far too much time on the subject. I looked at the various manufacturers and the setups required. TL;DR: To start with, you need fancy harness assemblies. Then you need to plug those harnesses into very, very expensive equip…

Aren't you both agreeing.. that it is way beyond $40? :) You need a six figure wallet to want to spend $20k on a tester :)

> You need a six figure wallet to want to spend $20k on a tester :)

Heh. I'll give you a +1 for that one.

Reminded me of the old joke...

What's the quickest way to become a millionaire ? Be a billionaire and buy an airline.

Re: WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do

#53

Post by kbouck »

callumprentice wrote: post #20
cinntaile wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you would need something that tracks relevant per cable metrics over time to see if it is degrading. That one just says yes/no, but maybe yes/no starts to flicker around its end of life?

Nod - that's what I was thinking. I expect it's often the connectors that deteriorate so perhaps moving them around while plugged in would tell me. Seems like a useful tool to have around.

i've used a treedix tester like this. the edition with many led lights, not the one with a screen.

wiggle the cables around to see if and when any of the lights flicker, indicating a bad or broken connection. i've found a few bad cables that would intermittently fail.

Re: WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do

#54

Post by callumprentice »

kbouck wrote: post #53
callumprentice wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nod - that's what I was thinking. I expect it's often the connectors that deteriorate so perhaps moving them around while plugged in would tell me. Seems like a useful tool to have around.

i've used a treedix tester like this. the edition with many led lights, not the one with a screen. wiggle the cables around to see if and when any of the lights flicker, indicating a bad or broken connection. i've found a few bad cables that would intermittently fail.

That's great. Thank you for the feedback - I ordered one just now.

Re: WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do

#56

Post by ssl-3 »

LoganDark wrote: post #29
traceroute66 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm using the hardware tester from $INSERT_NAME_HERE Oh god not again... before everyone starts naming their favourite brand, here's a 265 comment HN thread[1] (from last week !) on why these cheap USB-cable "testers" are not worth anything. TL;DR You need a six-figure wallet to seriously call anything a "hardware tester" for USB cables. User ChrisMarshallNY has a one-liner summary buried in that thread: Think abou…

Huh? Decent quality cable testers can be had for like $20,000. There's a difference between a general-purpose oscilloscope or logic analyzer and a purpose-built domain-specific appliance. I probably could've saved up for one in just a few months back when I had a job earlier this year.

In the world of specialized test equipment, $20k isn't too bad at all. It's a certainly still a lot of money in absolutes, but the barrier to entry is simple very high for this class of kit. The sales volume is low and the engineering to do precise work with RF signals at these kinds of frequencies is complex. The people doing the work of designing, building, and getting this stuff into the hands of end-users still need enough money to live healthy lives.

And $20,000 is five figures, so an off-the-cuff six figure estimate is an error of an order of magnitude. That's quite a large error.

But to bring it all back 'round again: The oft-repeated suggestion that a $40 device can do the same job represents an error of 3 or more orders of magnitude. :)

Some of the stuff in this cheaper class of kit can observe what happens in terms of voltage and/or current on the wire between two devices, some of them can have a chat with a cable and/or a device on their own to see what they state of their capabilities (as this software does), and some of them can also test things like DC continuity. That's useful, but it doesn't help to grade the actual signal characteristics of the cable.

There's a galaxy of difference between DC and a 40 GHz symbol rate.

Re: WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do

#57

Post by ssl-3 »

robot_jesus wrote: post #11

I'm curious if this also works for USB-A to USB-C. The use case: My Suburu has USB-A inputs and only allows wired Carplay. When I upgraded my iPhone and ditched Lightning, I had to try 6 different cables from my cable drawer to find one that supported data transfer. I have so many cables I've accumulated over the years, I should either purge or at least categorize the functionality of each.

Your Subaru+iPhone combo already tests that capability, does it not?

Just purge the known-bad cables already. :) (Gather them up and scrap them if the landfill seems like a harsh destination.)

In a situation of surplus, there's no reason I can think of where keeping charging-only cables around has merit.

Later on, if you need a cable that very specifically can do USB 3 speeds, then: Use a flashlight and look inside of the USB A connector. The ones that only have 1 row of 4 contacts will never be able to do USB 3, while the ones with 2 rows contacts will probably work fine.

Re: WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do

#58

Post by ssl-3 »

pdpi wrote: post #18
lxgr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can afford it, I'd honestly throw these out. "Charging only" is not a spec-compliant thing in USB-C, and personally I wouldn't want to re-discover which devices do and don't support them every time I just want to quickly grab a cable. What's less easy to replace are all these damn USB-C devices lacking the UFP-identifying circuitry that only work on USB-A chargers using A-to-C cables...

To be clear, they're not literally "charging only", AIUI they're spec-compliant cables with USB2.0 480Mbps and power delivery, and they're allowed to not have the four SuperSpeed wire pairs. They're still useful for low bandwidth devices (like charging my keyboard/mouse). Incidentally — I spent an inordinate amount of time searching for USB3.2 cables on Amazon, and the vast majority of cables were actually just USB2.…

Amazon's search is awful and I do not recall a time when it was better. It's probably this way by design, so that it always tends to present a never-ending stream of products to buy.

But over here in the real world where I need a specific sort of USB 3.2 widget: Either the USB 3.2 widget exists, or it does not exist. Presenting pages and pages of not-results that were already explicitly defined as irrelevant do not help a person to spend money. :)

(eBay's advanced search mode seems to still get it close-enough to right when rote specificity is important. I use it all the time to find very particular things.)

Re: WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do

#59

Post by nerdsniper »

vel0city wrote: post #35
nerdsniper wrote: post #25

Something that keeps needing to be pointed out every thread this stuff appears on: What these tools report are not functionally different from just believing "what's on the packaging", despite the misleading marketing claims. These tools read a chip called an "eMarker". These eMarkers are programmed to say whatever the manufacturer wants them to say - there's no requirement that the information be based in reality. P…

While I totally agree if you want to truly know the quality of the signal you need a very expensive box to actually measure the tiny deviations, if the question is "can this thing handle 80Gbit of data", can't you just get a couple of USB4 chips or whatever and have one send a pattern at that throughput and have the other try and receive and confirm that pattern? That would give you a basic "yes/no" kind of answer of…

Sure. But the cable tester that you describe here doesn't exist. You could maybe DIY it but there's none off the shelf.

Re: WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do

#60

Post by bestouff »

traceroute66 wrote: post #49
bestouff wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK sure your 6 figures thing or even that 20k thing are way better testers than the Treedix. But for my use case, i.e. verify what's actually in the cable (not blindly trusting the marker) the latter is sufficient and very ergonomic, and the "real" testers are overkill.

> verify what's actually in the cable (not blindly trusting the marker) the latter is sufficient But as was repeated 101 times on that thread .... All that those cheap $40 boxes are doing IS reading the marker. Sadly you are kidding yourself if you think a $40 box off Amazon is doing any sort of "verification". Let alone in any sort of calibrated, reproducible sense free of random unknown variables.

Then I am kidding myself, because I'm convinced it does a lot more.
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