USB-C Injected Molded Variant

[maltfield]

This ticket will track the effort to make a version of the BusKill cable with a USB-C plug.

Why?

At the time of writing, the only BusKill cable that we sell has a USB-A plug. Currently, if a user has a laptop with only USB Type-C ports, we recommend that they:

1. Make their own cable
2. Use an adapter

Recently we had an uptick of requests for a "native" USB-C BusKill cable, including for Henry Fisher in his review of the BusKill on TechLore.

Thanks to good sales of the USB-A BusKill cable, ASI has decided to research into the possibility to provide this option.

How?

Previously I had thought that a USB-C version would be an entirely different cable.

I had looked at these USB-C charging cables, typically sold with magnetically-detachable tips for compatibility with different devices/busses. The problem with this is that the quality of many of these are terrible, the suppliers come-and-go too frequently, they're made & spec'd for the intent of charging cell phones only (not data transfer), and most of them are male on both ends.

Today I'm finishing-up our third production run of the injection-molded USB-A cables (which we've been selling since 2022), and it occurred to me that we actually might be able to just use our existing USB-A magnetic coupler/receptacle for the USB-A storage drive with a new cable that has a USB-C plug on it instead of a USB-A plug.

[maltfield]

Arguably this ticket should be located in a new repo. Or I should rename this repo 'hardware'.

But:

1. renaming repos breaks things,
2. I don't really want to complicate things by having a second repo, and
3. well, this end result is for a device that has USB-C male on one side and USB-A female on the other, so it's still technically within the scope of a 'usb-a-magnetic-breakaway', right?

[goldfishlaser]

3 is the most convincing argument. And we so far have it set up so that variations get their own directory. I do support the idea of this repo supporting any type of hardware design though, and while changing names breaks things perhaps worth it to do sooner rather than later?

…

On Sat, Feb 8, 2025, 12:31 Michael Altfield ***@***.***> wrote: Arguably this ticket should be located in a new repo. Or I should rename this repo 'hardware'. But: 1. renaming repos breaks things, 2. I don't really want to complicate things by having a second repo, and 3. well, this end result is for a device that has USB-C male on one side and USB-A female on the other, so it's still technically within the scope of a 'usb-a-magnetic-breakaway', right? — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#12 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAER7EB4EUWOOUCAMYFMZLT2OY5PPAVCNFSM6AAAAABWX3TNKKVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMZDMNBVHA3DKMBQGY> . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[maltfield]

I asked a manufacturer about this, and they quickly responded with a pinout diagram.

Note the document is dated June 2023, so it sounds like they've made this for other customers before. Which is a good sign that things will be straight-foward and we'll be less likely to run into issues in the production & QA process.

Full disclosure: I'm definitely not an EE, and I don't know off-hand if that pinout is correct. I could try to google it and verify it, but honestly I still wouldn't be confident in my findings. But I got written confirmation that they assured us this would work for both power and data transfer. They understand our needs, and they're the experts.

They said they'd send us a sample in 1-week. We'll test that out to make sure it feels durable and passes our QA requirements.