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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

I like your idea of a wild night out!

Note to others: that tester board looks fairly passive, i.e. I don't see (mention of) a microcontroller to talk to the chip that high-powered cables must have. So I guess it's somewhat limited in the number of things it can check?

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I have a cheaper version, it does basically all one needs by telling you how many conductors the cable has, if it's only got 4 lights lit up it's a simple USB2, more power LEDs is a higher power charging cable, more data pairs, higher data throughput/USB3, nearly all of the lights (usually bar 1 of the CCX) it's full DP/Thunderbot, data, charging, A/V etc.

Sometimes it even shows USB-C connectors that are only wired for one orientation!

More often than not just knowing the contact has OK connection is good enough.

As far as I know the marker chips is mostly to tell the devices to not abuse the cable.

The Treedix[0] can query e-marker chips.

[0] https://treedix.com/products/treedix-usb-cable-tester-usb-c-...

Huh, looking at the photos, they really don’t do the board justice. It’s a gorgeous thing to look at and one of the only “bare pcb” tools I’ve used that still functions after years of being thrown in a backpack. It is Fully passive I think (the newer BLE one does emarker queries etc.). But it does the job very well. I haven’t had it fail to identify the capabilities of any cable yet.

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