Making Your Own Custom USB Cables | Hacker News Reader

Making Your Own Custom USB Cables

geekhack.org

101 pointsmindcrime39 comments

"you might end up spending more than what several of the artisans out there charge for a single cable"

Artisanal USB cables? Seriously?

Geekhack is a community primarily focused around mechanical keyboards. When you spend >$200 on a keyboard, $30 for a handmade USB cable to match your keyboard isn't too bad. Given the amount of customization you could have in a USB cable, mass production isn't cost effective and that's why they're handmade.

For reference: https://i.redd.it/l2qmqefggm0z.jpg

What keyboard is this? It's beautiful.

Keycaps are a SA "1976" Keycap Set. You can get it on Massdrop: https://www.massdrop.com/buy/nineteenseventysix-sa-keycap-se...

You should browse /r/mk: https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/ :)

I'd say a custom mod based on Filco Minila.

Nice.

Gosh, I'm like $1500 deep into keyboards, cases, keycaps, etc because of that site.

Got some seriously cool shit though...

Haha, I guess it makes total sense that the HN community and mech community have some overlap. I am guilty of spending a lot on keyboards, keysets, and artisans.

I'm almost $1K deep as well. :)

I'll stop buying when a programmable ortholinear with trackpoint mouse is on the market.

Oh, that's my current project! Unfortunately that cannot be made mass-market, because you can't get any decent trackpoints (except from IBM and Lenovo keyboards).

Also the new trackpoint that Lenovo offers isn't decent. This short trackpoint they offer now that doesn't support concave nubs sucks.

Having just downsized to a smaller more central apartment, I can understand this. There's no room in this place to shove my array of techno toys in a cupboard; instead, there's an ugly corner of the room that's currently a mess of cables and junk. I'm sizing up a little rack cabinet and some rack-mount gear to hide/tidy things into, but even then, if this thing has to sit out permanently, I can see the appeal of a braided network cable or some such to make it a little less unsightly.

Shrug.

It’s the same thing with hand-sleeved PC cables. If you have to have cables, it’s nice if they look good. Especially if you have a good color scheme going, why settle for a boring black rubber cable?

Reminds me of people who buy chrome "dress up kits" for under the hood. I'm partial to the "rad rod" look myself :-) i.e. all go and no show.

Darn, I meant "rat rod".

Look at audiophile stuff. Audio Nervosa is a serious condition.

Remember, silver conductors affect the bits as they move through the cable, and can enhance the highs to clarify your music. /s

You may enjoy this old thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8690893

Someone has to supply steampunk themed items for those not crafty enough to do it themselves...

See Pexon PC's in the UK for pioneers of this.

(No link, go Google if you want... Not affiliated)

Pexon just sell MDPC premade cables. https://www.cable-sleeving.com/

Could you link to the actual MDPC cable?

Which cable specifically? PEXON will either sell you the MDPC kits, tools and connectors, or premake the cables for you from those same kits.

You said they resold cables, and then linked to a company that sells sleeving.

I should've been more clear, they make the cables for you but they didn't really "pioneered" anything, companies like cablemod and million dollar PC did.

Pexon used to be an audio store that used to do headphones and speakers rewiring that effectively jumped on making premade MDPC cables since the audio business was pretty much dead (i think they've stopped doing audio completely).

http://passionforsound.lachlanfennen.com/massive-usb-compari...

I'd better get some fancy HDMI cables to match one of these USB cables... ;)

Some people buy custom made braided cables for the design as well as more flexibility than standard plastic/rubber ones.

Aesthetics.

In the early days of home computing and the early days of the PC it was a common requirement to roll your own cables. Getting the pin-out of a parallel port soldered up correctly was not so simple, even RS-232 serial cables were harder than the USB to get right.

I can't fully remember why it was required to make such cables on a regular basis but it happened. It seems that USB has not only made cable soldering a lot easier it has also removed the practical need to do so. Either that or I am no longer a 'hobbyist' with interest in such things.

I remember all that! I ran a BBS for awhile. For some reason, I couldn't find a RS-232 cable that routed the ring indicator correctly. I had to build my own cable with parts from Radio Shack.

A friend of mine recently told me about his partner who has been issued with a device by doctors to manage a long term health condition. It was provided with a USB A to USB Micro B cable, which it uses for its power, but no additional peripherals (i.e. no proprietary mains-USB power supply) were provided. A week after getting the device, it's needed in an emergency while on holiday, so they run to the car to get a usb cable to power the device from a USB power bank. Surprise surprise, the device would not power on. The workaround in this case was that they fortunately had a very short 10cm usb cable stashed away in the car from an old Raspberry Pi project, and this short cable worked.

The current theory (no pun intended) is that the VBus and ground wires within the provided USB cable (which they had forgotten to bring) are thicker than standard guage and/or that the power management circuit on the input to the device has an undervoltage limit set in hardware that is set too strictly, effectively locking you out from using any standard usb cable (30AWG wires typically), even though the provided cable looks totally ordinary from the outside. I would not be surprised at this as there are many companies that make 'data block' USB cables that omit D+/D- wires and instead beef up the VBus and ground wires, but look like a totally ordinary USB cable. There are also companies that parallel the D+/D- with VBus/GND for greater current capacity, but you wouldn't know without taking it apart.

I find it astonishing that a device designed for use in potential medical emergencies could have been designed this way with no warning of this in its manual, or if if this is a hardware bug that this issue was not discovered very quickly during hardware verification tests (if indeed any were performed).

Coincidentally i was recently having issues with charging of USB power bank. Very similarly I was trying to charge the power bank with a USB A to Micro B cable from a mains USB charger and thought that the power bank was charging quite slowly. I hooked it up to a current clamp and it turns out that wiggling the micro B end of the cable when it's mated to the Micro B receptacle on the power bank swings the charge current anywhere from from 100mA to 1A. I borrowed a 'custom' USB cable that a friend had bought off Amazon and it was even worse, not budging above 300mA. Incidentally, the power bank states it can handle 2.1A charging current on its micro B input (which curiously appears to be above the specification of a micro B receptacle but that's a separate issue). Only by making a custom cable myself, using 20AWG power and ground wires, using a high quality $5 Hirose micro B plug and then epoxying the connector ends to make a tight fit was I able to get the 2.1A charging current.

I find it concerning and I'm really not convinced adding charging capability to the USB specification as early as they did was a good idea. Having said that, they were probably just trying to standardise what a lot of people were abusing USB for already.

TLDR; not all USB cables are made equal. We live in times of mass usage and abusage of USB. Be careful out there.

Voltage droop is a real issue for many cables not just USB ones. It's a much bigger issue when you use them for power, it's a pretty well known issue that cable length and gauge can have (a pretty big) effect on charge speeds. It's even a bigger issue on the higher end devices that will limit the charge not only based on voltage but also on current, basically if the cable can't deliver the the 2 amps they'll drop down to 500ma or even lower.

I've switched most of my USB charging cables to those which I know are 20AWG, the funny thing is that these cables aren't even more expensive I got mine from http://www.portablepowersupplies.co.uk/ and they are cheaper than most cables on Amazon....

I've had on/off problems for a couple years now with a usb powered audio interface (focusrite 2i2) causing popping sounds from speakers--recognisable as a DC thump but happening every few hours. Once I fixed it by using a powered usb hub, but a change in PC hardware made it come back. Eventually I found a support post from the manufacturer saying that you had to use the provided USB cable, and that others weren't supported. I'd changed mine for ergonomic reasons (it's short as hell) and this turned out to be the problem.

I've been wanting to know exactly what's different about the usb cable for a while. And if other devices expecting a standard cable might have problems using it.

Would love to see a similar post for USB C. I've been trying to find some way of doing a right-angle with these, but without much luck.

I have found the best way to get right angled USB connection that can be repeatably and reliably wired and is robust for rugged use is to create a small interface PCB in CAD software like Eagle and use a PCB mount receptacle rather than a straight inline/wire-to variant.

The PCB only needs to be big enough to land a through-hole usb connector [1] and then bring copper traces from each pin perpendicular to the connector to the edge of the PCB. You can even make the PCB quite long If you want to you as this will give you long copper traces you can expose to land the wire ends on, which is very useful if you don't have a great soldering iron or don't have much experience soldering. You could even 3D print an overmould to make it look professional, otherwise epoxy. Using this method you can get an right angled usb that's a tighter angle than anything you'll find online because it doesn't rely on cable bend radius to make the angle.

[1] https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/mill-max-manufactu...

That's a pretty cool idea. However, I see two rows of pins on that connector, doesn't that matter? Are you making a two-sided PCB, or are you just soldering the pins together? I'm not sure if they're the same or not.

Credit goes to Hirose for the idea on USB Micro B, as they hint at it their ZX catalogue [1], but logically everything on USB devices is normally a receptacle_ so custom cables really is the only use for a PCB mount _plug_. If you download the catalogue and scroll to page 3 you can see example 3D renders on the second half of that page that might make it a bit more obvious what I was describing.

In actual fact for USB C you'd probably end up having to mount all connectors in the cables on tiny PCBs regardless, because of the potential requirements for signal conditioning and electronic marking ICs unique to USB C implementations. With so many pins on usb C without a doubt you'd need these tiny PCBs to be double sided to get all the traces to the PCB edge, and I wouldn't be surprised if some commercial usb C leads have PCBs with 4 layers.

I've only designed PCBs myself for the traditional USB PCB mount USB A plug (an Amphenol part) and Micro B plugs (Hirose ZX series parts) as these are very simple pinouts and are perfectly doable for a hobbyist I'd say if you want custom cabling. USB C looks significantly more complex and an in-cable PCB interface is the only way to go for that level of complexity.

[1] https://www.hirose.com/product/en/products/ZX/

I wouldn't play with USB Type C unless you know that you will never use them in any USB high power scenarios. 100W isn't the place for questionable soldering and thin wires.

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