Hi everyone!
Over the years, I’ve started having big collection of cables or dongles.
Mostly USB-C, USB-A to Micro USB, USB A to C, USB C to A, HDMI…
I was wondering how I could know their specifications as nothing is written on them. Maybe through a Linux program telling me how fast they can transfer data.
I was wondering also if there was a way to know how much power was sent to a device when these cables are used to power one. For instance, I’ve noticed that my Steam Deck battery was draining when playing games with 15TDP and being charged with an iPhone charger.
I don’t know if it’s useful, but here are my computers: Steam Deck running Steam OS, Surface Go 1 running Fedora Silverblue, MacBook Pro 2012 running PopOs.
I don’t want to buy anything to be able to measure how much data or power these cables can send😇
Thanks in advance for your help.
Unfortunately there’s no way to actually know what’s going on with a cable without testing it and as of eight or so years ago you can’t trust cables to conform to the spec.
You should either buy a cable tester, not use high powered supplies or throw away what you have and buy cables you know are what they say they are.
Especially for power delivery, buy a tester. It’s cheaper than a house fire.
He knows how
For something like a USB-C to C or USB-C to A, If you have something like an external M.2 SSD with a USB C connector and a fast enough port on your PC, you could see how fast a large file transfers. For USB C to C, most things I think should be USB 3.0 or higher, and you can tell whether some USB As are USB 2.X or USB 3.X by looking down the end and seeing whether it has that smaller fifth pin in the back. The color of the plastic tab in the USB can sometimes be an indicator, albeit an unreliable one as manufacturers are always screwing around with the colors. Blue usually means USB 3.X, black sometimes means USB 2.X, and white sometimes means USB 1.X. Any other color like orange is more likely to mean USB 3 than not, but not necessarily.
For USB A to Micro USB, I am fairly certain those will be USB 2.X. I am not aware of any micro USB device which operated at USB 3.X speeds. The only thing to watch out for are cheap cables with only power and ground populated and no data lines. But the easy way to test that is to just see whether a device is detected and identified at all by your PC through the cable, as that means the data lines are populated.
HDMI, I’m less sure, but if you have a high resolution/refresh rate monitor, you could try connecting it between the PC and the monitor and see what resolution/refresh rate options are listed, or seeing if there are visual artifacts or noise at the highest settings.
Okay thanks, I’ll look at my cables when I’m home.
Usually if a cable doesn’t come with specifications, you’d have to measure it yourself. Resistance / voltage drop tells us what kind of power can be transferred. It’s the same as with regular power cables. And I guess which contacts are connected can be measured with one of those (cheap) rigs. There’s small devices available for that job. And of course a computer can try to transfer data and see how that goes.
To get the know the true spec you need special measuring devices. No software can tell you the true spec without knowing the actual inside of the cable. You can do a few test to get a rough estimate though. But that means testing all the capabilities and see what it does. Could be using the cables way out of spec that way however.
This will tell you which types of “fast charging” Power Delivery a cable will handle and if the cable supports data, and will identify some types of electrical faults https://treedix.com/products/treedix-usb-cable-tester-usb-c-cable-tester-usb-tester-for-data-transmission-and-power-transmission-cable-testing-resistor-testing-type-c-emarker-for-usb-a-micro-b-micro-b-3-0-type-c-lighting-mini-b
And this kind of thing will tell you how much power is actually being transferred (but nothing about data transfer) - as someone else mentions, this also depends on the device you’re charging/powering, and the power source, but it is a more immediately useful number than what specification is supported: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807855183284.html?browser_id=c9623fd12fa5452c9941ee83c4bcb933&m_page_id=jrd5irtoihqcaaw419fcdda6dc0206069af12e5513
Clean AliExpress link: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807855183284.html
There are cheap USB cable testers that will tell you what pins are connected and what speed the e marker chip reports. Actually measuring the bandwidth of the cable requires some expensive test equipment though.
Well something like this https://github.com/meliorisse/CordIDMonitor or this https://github.com/connection-information-suite/usb-connection-information-menubar-linux or https://github.com/nedrichards/whatcable-linux sounds kind of useful for my case
I’d try to stay away from isolated projects on GitHub that only have a single maintainer, to avoid the risk of installing malware. You could check the https://aur.archlinux.org/ to see if any of those have been uploaded here and if there are any comments on the package. If there are none but you still would like to install, check out this guide to learn how to vet the “installer”.
It’s true that I’ve never thought about being more careful when I get these small programs from Github.
Regarding the part about how much power is sent to a device using a cable, that has to do with the charger (the plug or wall wart the cable is plugged into) and not the cable itself. Usually the charger will have text on it saying what voltage and how many amps it can deliver. And for your purposes of “how much power” you likely want to know how many amps. More amps is more power. But the device you plug in to charge needs to also support negotiating that many amps from that charger (different charger types as well and not all are supported by all devices, they all fall back to few amps if negotiation fails so it will still charge but it won’t fast charge)
Without getting into it too far: it matters more what version of USB or HDMI the cable supports rather than the cable itself.
Ie: the cables are just wires. More wires (according to the usb or HDMI spec) = better cable (okay this is a huge simplification…) But the actual speed and power that can go through the cable depends on the things at either end of the cable more than the cable itself. The cable just connects them.
So I would look for the USB cable that supports USB 3.0 (look for a blue bit on the USB A plug, the plastic is blue to designate 3.0 A commectors) If it’s USB C to C then it gets iffy, there are cable makers that make their cables cheap by providing enough wires for usb 2.0 (or even sometimes cables only have enough to just charge, not send data) but not 3.0. It can also still be worth it to have a 2.0 cable, so I wouldn’t throw those all out just because they’re not the latest and greatest, but the 3.0 ones are the ones to definitely hang on to, and will also have been the most expensive because of having the most wires.
Идея с программой для инвентаризации, в которую надо было помещать характеристики и происхождение предметов, была хороша.
