5 ms·

You know what I'd love? A tool that lets me identify what USB-C features a cable supports. As I understand it there are multiple cable variations, but it's not

You know what I'd love? A tool that lets me identify what USB-C features a cable supports. As I understand it there are multiple cable variations, but it's not possible to identify visually. It would be even cooler to have a device that you could plug into a port to identify what USB-C features the host supports, but I don't know if that's possible. In general I like USB-C, but having such a large mix of capabilities without an easy way to identify what's supported is a big pain point.

jjoonathan 8y ago
Between USB-C and mSATA/mPCIe/M.2 it seems like in just few short years the state of hardware UX reverted from "match the shape to the hole" to "buy pre-matched / pre-assembled and don't you dare lose or mix/match anything." What happened? Psychoactive substances in the water? Hostile takeover of the standards bodies by marketroids? Anyone here have an inside perspective?
- userbinator 8y ago
  I think it's just a grotesque proliferation of complexity and "feature-driven standards development".
  - jjoonathan 8y ago
    You're probably right, but the temptation to sacrifice HW UX for features isn't a new phenomenon yet the equilibrium seems to have shifted noticeably in the latest HW generation.
- slededit 8y ago
  The original designers thought people would just make uber cables with full support. Manufacturers noticed they could shave off a few cents removing support for features "nobody uses".
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    Did they really expect every cable to have an active chip in it just to support 5 amps instead of 3? And it should have been obvious that charging-focused cables with no superspeed lanes would exist. When it comes to different qualities of wire, and Superspeed vs. Superspeed+, I'm ready to blame the manufacturers. But is that actually a problem in practice? Are there 1 meter cables that have been tested to not support Superspeed+? And the mess of what-supports-what with thunderbolt speeds is definitely Intel's fault.
    - slededit 8y ago
      The less you twist the cable the less wire you use - but at the cost of noise. Manufacturers have no problems making the cheapest cable that just barely negotiates at the lowest speed level. Like with SD card speeds its a hard sell on the store shelf to get the more expensive one. People don't know how Superspeed vs Superspeed+ is going to affect them. Plus given the markup at Best Buy people can barely afford the cable as it is. I always found it funny Fry's has a separate cable section near where they sell soldering irons for people who know better.
  - adrianmonk 8y ago
    This is how market competition works. When choosing which product to buy, a few people do in-depth research, but most people just look at what is immediately obvious. If a difference in features or quality isn't readily apparent at this stage (and/or the buyer is not educated enough on the subject to understand/appreciate it), then it doesn't provide a competitive advantage. Put another way, people will not buy a product just because it is better. It only matters if it is better in a way that is hard to miss in the short time (think 15 seconds or something) that someone might spend deciding which product to buy. This is one reason competition isn't a silver bullet for ensuring the best products win.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      That's assuming there is no iteration. The people who buy products without doing the research get burned and so next time they do the research. There is no easy way to avoid this. If all somebody knows is that they want a "video cable" they're going to come home with an RCA cable. At best you have someone you trust who can answer your questions, at worst you pay the cost of learning for yourself.
- ken 8y ago
  Simpler: Hanlon's Razor. When engineers see 5 different physical ports, they want to consolidate, because there's no good reason for them to be different, and there are real benefits to be gained by having them all the same. E.g., Stuart Cheshire (Chairman, ZEROCONF Working Group), 2002: "My hope is that in the future — distant future perhaps — your computer will only need one wired communication technology. It will provide power on the connector like USB and FireWire, so it can power small peripheral devices. It will use IP packets like Ethernet, so it provides your wide-area communications for things like email and Web browsing, but it will also use Zeroconf IP so that connecting local devices is as easy as USB or FireWire is today. People ask me if I'm seriously suggesting that your keyboard and mouse should use the same connector as your Internet connection, and I am." It's a great vision, but unfortunately, on the path from here to there, features get cut. If your product needs to support 5 different protocols, and you have to cut 1 to ship on time, that's still pretty good as far as your own product is concerned (80%!). If every manufacturer does this, though, you end up with a mess of cables and connectors that aren't quite compatible with each other -- and users are more miserable than before this whole exercise started. I don't think anyone wants their USB-C device or cable to be intentionally incompatible with another USB-C device or cable. They just don't make 100% compatibility a hard requirement.
  - userbinator 8y ago
    When engineers see 5 different physical ports, they want to consolidate, because there's no good reason for them to be different, and there are real benefits to be gained by having them all the same. Only certain engineers. Don't group the ones who love gratuitous complexity and "value engineering" with those who think complex standards like USB-C are a horrible idea and would rather have separate and simple interfaces. There's a reason RS-232/485 (along with good old D connectors) are still extremely prevalent in non-consumer equipment.
    - sitkack 8y ago
      And to think that USB was designed to kill Firewire and require a PC-in-loop because Intel was scared of peripherals that could talk to each other w/o an intermediary! Now we have those smart peripherals and 20x the complexity. Thanks Intel. And thanks Apple for making Firewire too expensive. In my alternate universe my home AV equipment networks with GPIB and 1Ge PoE with SCTP.
- snaky 8y ago
  > What happened? It became very cheap to put inside a chip. That's it.
  - walterbell 8y ago
    Now we get a decade or two of learning why that chip firmware needs to have open-source mechanisms that enforce separately defined policy.
edude03 8y ago
This is exactly what I'm looking for at the moment! This + passthrough would be amazing!
LeoPanthera 8y ago
I think that's what this does: https://www.tindie.com/products/aroerina2/usb-cable-checker/ https://www.tindie.com/products/aroerina2/usb-cable-checker/
- FullyFunctional 8y ago
  For $34, that looks pretty good (though I hate that we need this). I'd pay much more for something that could do signal integrity measurements on the cable as well.
  - snaky 8y ago
    That's only one logical way forward for guys like YZXStudio to add simple vector analyzer function to their 'USB testers'.
    - voltagex_ 8y ago
      Probably offtopic, but do you know if there's any relationship between RDTech and YZXStudio? They've got very similar designs, but RDTech doesn't seem to be a "simple" cloner.
      - snaky 8y ago
        They copy some parts of design from each others, that's different culture of innovations in China. Bunnie has some explanations of that phenomena tagged 'gongkai' https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=20 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=20
        voltagex_ 8y ago
        I figured it was something like this. I wonder how you distinguish gonkai from straight up cloning though. For the USB C board that I posted in this thread, the copies have taken the text but they're missing half the features - not an improvement
  - 8y ago
RivieraKid 8y ago
And that would also check if the cable complies with the specification.

jjoonathan 8y ago

Between USB-C and mSATA/mPCIe/M.2 it seems like in just few short years the state of hardware UX reverted from "match the shape to the hole" to "buy pre-matched / pre-assembled and don't you dare lose or mix/match anything." What happened? Psychoactive substances in the water? Hostile takeover of the standards bodies by marketroids? Anyone here have an inside perspective?

userbinator 8y ago
I think it's just a grotesque proliferation of complexity and "feature-driven standards development".
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  You're probably right, but the temptation to sacrifice HW UX for features isn't a new phenomenon yet the equilibrium seems to have shifted noticeably in the latest HW generation.
slededit 8y ago
The original designers thought people would just make uber cables with full support. Manufacturers noticed they could shave off a few cents removing support for features "nobody uses".
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  Did they really expect every cable to have an active chip in it just to support 5 amps instead of 3? And it should have been obvious that charging-focused cables with no superspeed lanes would exist. When it comes to different qualities of wire, and Superspeed vs. Superspeed+, I'm ready to blame the manufacturers. But is that actually a problem in practice? Are there 1 meter cables that have been tested to not support Superspeed+? And the mess of what-supports-what with thunderbolt speeds is definitely Intel's fault.
  - slededit 8y ago
    The less you twist the cable the less wire you use - but at the cost of noise. Manufacturers have no problems making the cheapest cable that just barely negotiates at the lowest speed level. Like with SD card speeds its a hard sell on the store shelf to get the more expensive one. People don't know how Superspeed vs Superspeed+ is going to affect them. Plus given the markup at Best Buy people can barely afford the cable as it is. I always found it funny Fry's has a separate cable section near where they sell soldering irons for people who know better.
- adrianmonk 8y ago
  This is how market competition works. When choosing which product to buy, a few people do in-depth research, but most people just look at what is immediately obvious. If a difference in features or quality isn't readily apparent at this stage (and/or the buyer is not educated enough on the subject to understand/appreciate it), then it doesn't provide a competitive advantage. Put another way, people will not buy a product just because it is better. It only matters if it is better in a way that is hard to miss in the short time (think 15 seconds or something) that someone might spend deciding which product to buy. This is one reason competition isn't a silver bullet for ensuring the best products win.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    That's assuming there is no iteration. The people who buy products without doing the research get burned and so next time they do the research. There is no easy way to avoid this. If all somebody knows is that they want a "video cable" they're going to come home with an RCA cable. At best you have someone you trust who can answer your questions, at worst you pay the cost of learning for yourself.
ken 8y ago
Simpler: Hanlon's Razor. When engineers see 5 different physical ports, they want to consolidate, because there's no good reason for them to be different, and there are real benefits to be gained by having them all the same. E.g., Stuart Cheshire (Chairman, ZEROCONF Working Group), 2002: "My hope is that in the future — distant future perhaps — your computer will only need one wired communication technology. It will provide power on the connector like USB and FireWire, so it can power small peripheral devices. It will use IP packets like Ethernet, so it provides your wide-area communications for things like email and Web browsing, but it will also use Zeroconf IP so that connecting local devices is as easy as USB or FireWire is today. People ask me if I'm seriously suggesting that your keyboard and mouse should use the same connector as your Internet connection, and I am." It's a great vision, but unfortunately, on the path from here to there, features get cut. If your product needs to support 5 different protocols, and you have to cut 1 to ship on time, that's still pretty good as far as your own product is concerned (80%!). If every manufacturer does this, though, you end up with a mess of cables and connectors that aren't quite compatible with each other -- and users are more miserable than before this whole exercise started. I don't think anyone wants their USB-C device or cable to be intentionally incompatible with another USB-C device or cable. They just don't make 100% compatibility a hard requirement.
- userbinator 8y ago
  When engineers see 5 different physical ports, they want to consolidate, because there's no good reason for them to be different, and there are real benefits to be gained by having them all the same. Only certain engineers. Don't group the ones who love gratuitous complexity and "value engineering" with those who think complex standards like USB-C are a horrible idea and would rather have separate and simple interfaces. There's a reason RS-232/485 (along with good old D connectors) are still extremely prevalent in non-consumer equipment.
  - sitkack 8y ago
    And to think that USB was designed to kill Firewire and require a PC-in-loop because Intel was scared of peripherals that could talk to each other w/o an intermediary! Now we have those smart peripherals and 20x the complexity. Thanks Intel. And thanks Apple for making Firewire too expensive. In my alternate universe my home AV equipment networks with GPIB and 1Ge PoE with SCTP.
snaky 8y ago
> What happened? It became very cheap to put inside a chip. That's it.
- walterbell 8y ago
  Now we get a decade or two of learning why that chip firmware needs to have open-source mechanisms that enforce separately defined policy.

edude03 8y ago

This is exactly what I'm looking for at the moment! This + passthrough would be amazing!

LeoPanthera 8y ago

I think that's what this does: https://www.tindie.com/products/aroerina2/usb-cable-checker/ https://www.tindie.com/products/aroerina2/usb-cable-checker/

FullyFunctional 8y ago
For $34, that looks pretty good (though I hate that we need this). I'd pay much more for something that could do signal integrity measurements on the cable as well.
- snaky 8y ago
  That's only one logical way forward for guys like YZXStudio to add simple vector analyzer function to their 'USB testers'.
  - voltagex_ 8y ago
    Probably offtopic, but do you know if there's any relationship between RDTech and YZXStudio? They've got very similar designs, but RDTech doesn't seem to be a "simple" cloner.
    - snaky 8y ago
      They copy some parts of design from each others, that's different culture of innovations in China. Bunnie has some explanations of that phenomena tagged 'gongkai' https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=20 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=20
      - voltagex_ 8y ago
        I figured it was something like this. I wonder how you distinguish gonkai from straight up cloning though. For the USB C board that I posted in this thread, the copies have taken the text but they're missing half the features - not an improvement
- 8y ago

RivieraKid 8y ago

And that would also check if the cable complies with the specification.