I'm using the hardware tester from Treedix in which you have to plug both ends of the cable and which tests a lot of things, I'm quite fond of it.
I have a basket with a lot of USB-c cables and without the tester I can't remember (nor guess) which one does what.
Yep, I probably have the same one. Insanely useful, and it is also crazy how much variance there is in cables. You can’t believe what the sellers claim, so many times they end up being less capable than claimed.
Would this tell me if a cable is close to the end of it's life? I like to travel light and I've had cables (mostly phone/pad power) go out on trips after working as expected when I packed.
I think you would need something that tracks relevant per cable metrics over time to see if it is degrading.
That one just says yes/no, but maybe yes/no starts to flicker around its end of life?
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> I'm using the hardware tester from $INSERT_NAME_HERE
Oh god not again... before everyone starts naming their favourite brand, here's a 265 comment HN thread[1] (from last week !) on why these cheap USB-cable "testers" are not worth anything.
TL;DR You need a six-figure wallet to seriously call anything a "hardware tester" for USB cables. User ChrisMarshallNY has a one-liner summary buried in that thread:
Think about it. You need to generate a precise, calibrated, 40GHz signal, transmit it, then precisely measure the returned signal for phase, amplitude, and waveform integrity -at that speed. Oscilloscopes and logic analyzers that run at that speed, are damn expensive.
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Am I missing something? For practical use you only care if it carries a certain amount of packets per second without excessive retries, not whether it preserves the waveform exactly.
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Are you suggesting there is no middle ground and that simply knowing if a USB-C cable is a USB C cable or a fake one can't be done with a cheap tester?
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Huh? Decent quality cable testers can be had for like $20,000. There's a difference between a general-purpose oscilloscope or logic analyzer and a purpose-built domain-specific appliance. I probably could've saved up for one in just a few months back when I had a job earlier this year.
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