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Some Reversible USB-C Cables/Adapters Could Cause Irreversible Damage
TheRealHocusLocus writes: Three Decembers ago I lauded the impending death of the trapezoid. Celebration of the rectangle might be premature however, because in the rush-to-market an appalling number of chargers, cables and legacy adapters have been discovered to be non-compliant. There have been performance issues with bad USB implementation all along, but now — with improved conductors USB-C offers to negotiate up to 3A in addition the 900ma base, so use of a non-compliant adapter may result in damage. Google engineer and hero Benson Leung has been waging a one-man compliance campaign of Amazon reviews to warn of dodgy devices and praise the good. Reddit user bmcclure937 offers a spreadsheet summary of the reviews. It's a jungle out there, don't get fried.
They just design things right from the beginning - don't buy cheap - don't drive Honda!
If you're relying on the cable having enough intelligence to prevent the two devices from hurting each other, you've already messed things up.
Timothy you've mentioned this before..
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/11/05/1959216/google-engineer-warns-against-perils-of-buying-cheap-third-party-usb-c-cables
When it comes to USB, test your equipment, even if you haven't upgraded to Type C yet.
I've personally discovered two counterfeit or substandard (depending upon your personal definitions of the terms) USB charging cables.
What I use to test is a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10-inch tablet. This tablet wants approximately 0.7-0.8 amps at 5 volts, but it will charge in a degraded mode if the charging cable isn't up to snuff, or if it's plugged into a desktop or laptop (which normally only supply 0.5 amps).
Every cable should begin by charging in the degraded mode when plugged into my laptop and then upgrade to normal charging mode when plugged into any of my half dozen or so 2 amp USB chargers. Among over a dozen cables, I detected two that were not up to snuff, and you'd be surprised at my results. One cable from the dollar store was garbage, but another, colored cable from the dollar store that had fancy LEDs was fine. Three 10 feet cables were fine. The other reject was an average-looking cable with an average feel. It did not appear to be substandard or counterfeit.
If you want to get fancy you can get a device from banggood.com that measures current and voltage across the USB port. They cost about $3 shipped. That is how I determined that my tablet will draw approximately 0.7-0.8 amps. From that experience I'd be surprised if many devices actually draw a full 2 amps. It's nice to have a 2 amp supply, though, because it gives you a safety factor if your cables are somewhat substandard. Maybe the newest 2016 phones will draw close to 2 amps. Get the meter and find out!
Based upon my experience, the best USB chargers are from Samsung and anything else that has a counterfeit-resistant UL sticker. And also based upon my experience, if you notice that a charging cable is getting warm, you should probably replace it because it's dissipating electricity as heat rather than conducting it.
This isn't a USB 3 problem, it's just a general problem with stuff you plug in to computers.
The issue was that the power and ground wires were swapped over. Even on USB 2 that only supplies 500mA it would most likely have killed something. And the same goes for every other port on the machine, including HDMI, Thunderbolt, FireWire, PS2 and eSATA+power.
Any type of cable wired this way is liable to kill something.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
We need inexpensive reliable testers for usb cables. Basically a box where you plug the cables in and it does the various electrical tests.
John_Chalisque
This is one of the advantages of Apple owning more of the rights to a connector and actively smacking down 3rd parties that don't license it properly. You don't see as much of this kind of thing going on, at the slightly greater expense to the end user of them taking a cut of the connectors that are sold.
Better known as 318230.
err-reversable
I thank you.
If you plug in a non-compliant usb-c cable into a device's usb port, a compliant device should be able to recognize it as such and simply refuse to operate. It should categorically *NOT* cause the device to cease to operate.
The fact that this guy apparently shorted a $1000 computer because of a badly made $10 cable IMO shows just as much of a flaw in the computer as it does in the cable.
All that the computer needed to have on the port was a breaker that would trip if or when the expected limits were exceeded and it would have been fine.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
A quick analysis of the workbook by TheRealHocusLocus finds that "Approved" cables cost ~60% more than unapproved cables on the average.
Apprvd Average of Cost
NO $10.61
Yes $16.71
-- Jared
Anyone who has read any of the numerous HDMI-cable discussions knows: "All cables are the same. Just buy the cheapest cable."
It's completely impossible for one cable to be better than another, despite using better materials and processes and quality control procedures, better shielding, thicker conductors or more twists, etc. It's all just ones and zeros so cables don't matter. If there's power, that's a 1, right?
So any problems you encounter with "sparkles" or dropouts or loose connectors (or in this case, very slow charging, heat, melting, smoke or fire) are obviously the fault of the device. Never pay more than $2 for a cable or you're getting ripped off! :-/
The damage is the fault of the port design, not the cable. The port should be able to handle short circuits, switched wires, and incorrect power control signals without permanent damage. What if the perfectly approved Apple cable has been chafed and is now shorted to ground? Fail gracefully.
USB-C are assigned to passively provide charging power at the same position regardless of the plug's orientation. It is NOT designed to handle the case of mis-wired cables that provide external power of reversed polarity. Instead, it is simply designed so that users can not cause problems with correctly-wired cables, under the reasonable premise that users won't be manufacturing their own non-compliant USB cables. The same result could happen if any other type of USB cable had its power pins reversed and provided power to a device.
One connects to all of your devices and accesses the data, the other is a hardware standard.
Imagine what would happen if there were no protections from people attaching equipment to their phone lines.... one person could sabatoge every landline telephone on his entire block.
If it's connecting to something made by a third party, it shouldn't matter if it is using a "standard" jack or not.... protection mechanisms should exist to ensure that noncompliant devices don't damage it.
Doing otherwise is the hardware equivalent of allowing a stack overflow bug based on unexpected user input.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
OMG - this is the most useful thing I've read on Slashdot in a while!!! (not sarcastic - I have a new nexus)
It was a Google employee whose company supplied computer was designed by the company themselves. He probably copped some flack from his manager for destroying a thousand dollar piece of hardware. But equally the QA team may cop bigger flack for not testing this scenario.
Wait for the 2016 model correcting this problem. :)
Ooops. Damn Patents.
Just looking over Benson Leung's reviews list, some of these items are transparently fishy. For instance, this Benson review currently has nearly 50% "unhelpful", while the product page is fully of sketchy positive reviews. It's a USB cable, who takes photos and writes essays about them (people with multimeters and cable testers aside)? Tried it in FakeSpot, and it figures the product has "68% low quality reviews".
Fake positive reviews and "unhelpful" spamming on negative reviews. Does Amazon have any mechanism to deal with this type of gaming?
Just looking over Benson Leung's reviews list, some of these items are transparently fishy. For instance, this Benson review has nearly 50% "unhelpful", while the product page is fully of sketchy positive reviews. It's a USB cable, who takes photos and writes essays about them? Tried it in FakeSpot, and it figures the product has "68% low quality reviews".
Fake positive reviews and "unhelpful" spamming on negative reviews. Does Amazon have any mechanism to deal with this type of gaming?
One crappy cord, and his $1500 computer would be fried.
From the article. It almost sounds like the guy was determined to continue his quest for a crappy cable until he destroyed an expensive laptop.
Any sane person - or one using equipment they have paid for, themselves - would have tested on something less expensive if not actually sacrificial. But no! This guy decides that a high-end computer should be his victim.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Three Ampères is a lot! I bet there are a lot of engineers that thought it was a typo when they looked at the maximum tolerance needed in the USB-C spec. :-)
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