Steve Jones
Richard Gaywoodwell done to everyone involved in making usb so complicated that now the only way to understand what it's doing is to put diagnostic screens on charging cables
just a really solid set of decisions all the way down
Tay@penllawen hey I have one of those! The screen is way too bright, it's annoying at night.
Jes Moved to @@Jessica @penllawen now that you mention it, I do have some tape that'd do tyis nicely...
Not a Spring Onion@penllawen
I would prefer a little box with dip switches in the middle, so I can reconfigure the cable on demand.
I would prefer a little box with dip switches in the middle, so I can reconfigure the cable on demand.
I present: The future of USB
Configurable RS232 Cable with DIP-Switch
The PTM-RS100 RS232 control cable from PureTools features a 9-pin D-type connector and a 3-pin Phoenix connector on the other end. By means of 3x3 DIP switches the assignment of Tx, Rx and GND at the Phoenix output can be configured freely. This allows the RS232 control signal to be adapted according to device and manufacturer specific requirements without having to change the cable. This is probably not the first RS232 cable in your possession, but certainly the last one you will need!
Rudi (ryjelsum)@wakame @penllawen i actually have little modules like this for usb-pd. i think they might also work for some of the other charge protocols, but i haven't checked, they're cool though. i think they're one of those knockoffs of someone's open source design that made it to aliexpress so they're fairly ubiquitous on any selling platform that allows people to list their own junk (ebay, amazon, etc)
I still don't quite understand why we can't have a base protocol and then negotiate the add-ons that both sides support and want.
Similar to "why is every computer port shrinking, only ethernet stays its clunky self?". 
Stéphanie@wakame @rudi @penllawen isn't that what's happening? At least for power delivery you start at the always-present 5V with max 500mA, and then voltage and current draw are negotiated. I (perhaps wrongly) assumed something similar was going on with other parts of the protocol.
(I know, silly of me to assume something sane from the group that brought us "USB 3.2 gen 2x2", but still)
(I know, silly of me to assume something sane from the group that brought us "USB 3.2 gen 2x2", but still)
In principle yes. In practice... "getting there" maybe? 
gunstick@gunstick @Stephanie @[email protected] @rudi At least the SD specs - like HDMI - are more or less just slowly improving over time, so you mostly only need to navigate the 2-3 competing spec abbreviations that happen to exist right now. That's still a bit easier to deal with USB-C, I think, which has the same cornucopia of naming conventions but has speedrun to it in a handful of years.
ShadSterling@wakame @rudi @penllawen I thought that was how it works, it’s just entirely opaque to the user, so when you connect a computer to a monitor and they have no protocols in common it just doesn’t work and there’s no way to discover why - and it’s made worse by some of them requiring specific cable features that not every cable has and there’s no way to discover which cable has which features
@wakame @rudi @penllawen USBc over Ethernet!
🤣
Then you have the PD Ethernet cable, and the Thunderbolt Ethernet cable. You even need the Ethernet Ethernet cable as the PD-Thunderbolt Ethernet cable does not support Networking.
🤣
Then you have the PD Ethernet cable, and the Thunderbolt Ethernet cable. You even need the Ethernet Ethernet cable as the PD-Thunderbolt Ethernet cable does not support Networking.
ananas@penllawen all hail the one cable to rule them all, finally. I love usb-c. I love usb-c. I love usb-c 
simonbp@penllawen I'm literally plugged in to a cable like right now. It's pretty great.
Gwen@penllawen To be fair there is nothing stoping any smart device from reporting it's exact charging state over either bluetooth or via it's own display
Manufacturers/software devs just insist on only giving vague results like "slowly" or "rapidly" if anything and leaving users stuck to figure out what the issue is
markus@penllawen 40/20 Gen.2.1 No notes.
Cegorach@penllawen @OchmennoPodcast I just got that display seperate to the cable
much more sensible
I mean… how would you debug problems with the cable otherwise?
(not saying your point would be invalid - not in the slightest)
✧✦Catherine✦✧@penllawen and that's not even all of USB! just the charging part
Paul Evans@penllawen I still want a USB C->C cable with direction arrows that only permits charging from left to right. That seems the easiest to understand way to ensure your phone doesn't accidentally charge your laptop.
Von Xylofon@penllawen The USB Consortium is hands-down the most inept standardisation organisation in the world. It should have been disbanded after they rolled out USB-A, a connector a child can see is fundamentally broken.
Squibbles@penllawen At least it's not bluetooth? 🤷
sbszine@penllawen See also HDMI cables
@sbszine Fair point, although at least it took ~20 years for HDMI to get this complex as it evolved over time. USB-C is doing the speedrun!
Gary 
@penllawen I mean, yesterday I was cursing the eejit that came up with power-only USB cables, but USB-C is a whole other world of pain
Doug@WiteWulf @penllawen those are very useful though. I never plug into any public USB port without one. Never know what’s on the other end.
gadgetoid@penllawen I’ve got a charging cable on test at the moment with a “diagnostic screen.”
Jac@penllawen the switch to USB C has resulted in me binning most of the cables I receive and only ever using the 3 or 4 that I know the spec of, and that are of decent quality.
It's not even as simple as some cables do power delivery, and some do data; there's all different rates for how much power and data they can handle.
leyrer
MacLemon@leyrer Display refresh rates are evil. Forget anything beyond the decimal comma. But for determining if your device is fast-charging or slowly they’re actually pretty helpful.
There are many “brands” that basically all sell the same hardware inside. Just different plug-plastics. This cables are often good for 100W charging, but always USB 2.0 data only.
Alex Stamos@penllawen It's really great that our cables need to have the same compute power NASA required to put men on the moon.
FRANK.MCCONNEL@penllawen Instead of "it takes a village", "it takes an industry and a standards organization"
discodeerdiary.gov@penllawen can it run doom
@aisling @penllawen I’m really looking forward to a DOOM port that runs on the cables internal chip, just plug one end into a mo for and the other into a keyboard. They have enough computing power, not sure about the storage
Kancept@penllawen I just want to be on their standard naming committee, as it's obvious I could say anything and they'll slap it on as a label as a standard and I'd still get paid.
Natasha Taylor@penllawen We've given up and just buy Thunderbolt because we know exactly what we'll get, instead of playing lucky-dip with the features.
Phil Stevens 
@penllawen And to think that Firewire died so that we could have this.
Darrin West@penllawen We don’t need diagnostic screens on the cables, that’s dumb. We need a universal usb cable tester w screen so we know what we are holding. Because they aren’t well labeled. I have an RJ45 tester, because who knows if the cable is good.
cermak_rd@penllawen We have a device with 2 usb-c ports. One of which hooks up to a ehci (so usb 2.0) controller and 1 to an OHCI (so usb 1.0 ) controller. There really doesn't have to be a correspondence between type of controller behind the usb-c connector and the connector itself.
@penllawen I wouldn’t call it a diagnostic screen unless it showed failure reasons, like the connected disk just reset because the hubs power demand exceeded its supply, or the monitor won’t work because the cable doesn’t support the only video protocol the host and monitor both support
Martin Seeger@penllawen Those cables are missing information on transmission speeds 😢
@penllawen Also note that, if you're blind, you don't even have the screen to explain. I've been looking for something to tell me the PD profile I'm using and what's flowing through the cable for years. I can't see, so there isn't one. Please note, mentioning OCR as a solution for this will be ignored, responding to that sort of thing just raises my blood pressure for no reason.
@techsinger Oooof, I am so sorry, that sounds awful.
Wulfy—Speaker to the machinesI like the wattage display in USB cables.
You can tell how powerful your charger is and how much the device is drawing. You would think it's an abstract luxury. But recently, my friend was travelling and through bad planning drained the phone totally flat. She had it on a charger for more than 24h and it was not coming up.
She was stressing, because these days ones whole life is on the device.
In the end. I used a powerful 2A tablet charger and the phone begun working again. Turns out this phone needed a powerful charger to "push" it over the threshold of life.
...also, it looks super geeky...
That is the real reason I love it.