There’s no disgrace in admitting you’ve been burned through a cheapo USB cable — ever since some bean counter learned there was once a couple of cents to be stored through generating “energy most effective” USB cables, no {hardware} hacker has been protected. However with this easy tester from [Álvaro Prieto] to your arsenal, you’ll by no means be fooled once more.
It’s about as straight-forward a design as imaginable, using not anything greater than a two dozen LEDs, their related resistors, and a not unusual CR2032 coin mobile. Merely plugging each side of your cable into the quite a lot of flavors of USB connectors at the tester will entire the vital circuits to illuminate the corresponding LEDs, right away telling you what number of intact wires are throughout the cable. So whether or not you’re coping with some shady cable that doesn’t have the whole supplement of conductors, or there’s some bodily injury that’s severed a connection or two, you’ll know at a look.
Clearly the tester is designed basically for the 24 pins you’ll to find in a correct USB-C connector, however it’s utterly backwards appropriate with older cables and connectors. We recognize that he even integrated the chunky Kind B connector, which we’ve at all times been keen on due to its robustness in comparison to the extra not unusual Mini and Micro variants.
Be mindful despite the fact that that this tester will most effective display you if there’s a connection between two pins, it received’t test how a lot energy it may possibly in reality deal with. For that, you’ll want some additional apparatus.
