You know how it goes — some gadgets stick around in your toolbox far longer than reason dictates, because maybe one day you’ll need it. How many of us held onto ISA diagnostic cards long past the death of the interface?
But unlike ISA, USB isn’t going away anytime soon. Which is exactly why this USB and more tester by [Iron Fuse] deserves a spot in your toolbox. This post is not meant to directly lure you into buying something, but seen how compact it is, it would be sad to challenge anyone to reinvent this ‘wheel’, instead of just ordering it.
So, to get into the details. This is far from the first USB tester to appear on these pages, but it is one of the most versatile ones we’ve seen so far. On the surface, it looks simple: a hand-soldered 14×17 cm PCB with twelve different connectors, all broken out to labelled test points. Hook up a dodgy cable or device, connect a known-good counterpart, and the board makes it painless to probe continuity, resistance, or those pesky shorts where D+ suddenly thinks it’s a ground line.
You’ll still need your multimeter (automation is promised for a future revision), but the convenience of not juggling probes into microscopic USB-C cavities is hard to overstate. Also, if finding out whether you have a power-only or a data cable is your goal, this might be the tool for you instead.
“it would be sad to challenge anyone to reinvent this ‘wheel’, instead of just ordering it.”
Sadly, ordering it is also a challenge, if one lives in the US. It appears that Tindie can’t currently figure out how to ship things there from overseas, presumably due to tariff uncertainty.
(Just mentioning because it’s a bummer for a reasonable subset of Hackaday readers)
It’s because they removed the “under $800 package free of customs” (except letters and something like that) and the customs need to be paid in advance, i’ve understood, so many, if not all, postal services have stopped sending anything, since US has not given any instructions on how this customs fee is supposed to be paid. That’s my understanding of the situation.
Although i think they are still sending stuff this week, but after that it stops until there is a resolution on how this customs system is supposed to be handled.
Australia’s postal service just stopped accepting US-bound parcels. I guess Yanks won’t be getting any kangaroo scrotum change purses for a while.
Ok, i see why they don’t want packages from outside now.
Canada Post is accepting US-bound packages, and has a way to prepay the tariffs.
It’s a complete mess. For cheap stuff, the handling fee to pay the import duty is higher than the import duty. Somehow big companies like AliExpress manage to avoid the handling fees, but ordering from smaller companies is now unaffordable.
“It’s because they removed the “under $800 package free of customs” ”
Beef has doubled in price at my local grocery store.
Did you try to order? I stopped short of Add to Cart when it said shipping was $91
Tindie has always been a nightmare for shipping, regardless of yours or the producers country. I’m amazed it continues to exist!
You may think it’s just Tindie, but at the moment several European postal services stopped accepting packages until the new rules are clear. Unrelated, but shipping from the US to EU is at least three times as expensive, so I also expect this to be a convenient moment to increase the EU to US fairs to match.
If I recall correctly, the reason it costs more to ship from the USA to Europe is due to rules and subsidies put in place by the International Postal Union so that people in poorer countries can ship stuff internationally without having to pay an arm and a leg. And since the USA is one of, if not, the rithest countries in the world, we have to pay more than it would cost other countries to ship to us in order to subsidize those shipping costs from other countries. Its also why shipping from China is so cheap is because they’re considered “poor” by the IPU’s eyes, along with subsidies put in place by the Chinese government.
I’m from the Netherlands myself, and consider it at par with the USA. Where I understand shipping to be lower in some countries, I don’t see how it correlates when a package from NL to the USA is around €15 per kilogram, and the return is well above €50. This is fine for a single vintage transistor, but it adds up if you are heavily interested in locks, safes, and books.
Unrelated to the shipping cost, the Netherlands adds sales 21% tax, as they would have received that if I bought the same thing for the same price in the Netherlands. Sometimes additional fees are added, making purchasing stuff from eBay a rarity for me, these days. Easily doubling the price of the item. This is quite sad as the USA has many locks I can’t find here. Not to mention that selling at the same inflated prices is remarkably difficult.
This is quite an impressive circuit board! I like it as a piece of modern art.
I’ve built many manual testers, but always found them rather tedious. Just adding a simple LED chaser greatly improves the usefulness without too much complication.
I use the Treedix USB Cable Tester – they’ve got 2 variants:
https://treedix.com/products/treedix-usb-cable-tester-board-usb-cable-checker-data-wire-with-acrylic-case-charging-test-data-line-type-c-micro-type-a-type-b
^^ This one is similar to the one in this article, but with LEDs
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
^^ This one is the fancier version that’ll look for USB EMarker chips too.
Frankly, that looks a lot more useful than just providing breakout points as in the article.
$91.00 USD shipping???? I think not!!!!
And WHY is this stuff ALWAYS out of stock???
The shipping is horrible!
But why out of stock? It’s a hacker selling his/her design, rather than a megacorp. If it becomes unexpectedly popular, they will stock out. Even megacorps stock out, of course, but how many of Your Cool Widget to produce is not an easy question to answer ahead of time.
Only one small iteration would turn it into the https://xkcd.com/1406/ Universal Connector Box