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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.

Nice. You just got them a sale from me. I have a crap ton of cables so this will come in handy.

> 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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49152255

ChromeOS firmware has a bunch of this built in - it's super cool. https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2026/01/05/chromebooks-iden... and https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/1pyojjd/comme... and https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform2/+/HEA... is where I found out about it. A lot of the clever capabilities rely on the firmware that you have. Source - having spent a while a few weeks back getting Codex to poke at this topic on my machine https://github.com/nedrichards/whatcable-linux/blob/main/doc... since framework do reuse parts of the ChromeOS Embedded Controller in their firmware.

"This is a Linux-native reimplementation inspired by darrylmorley/whatcable"

https://github.com/nedrichards/whatcable-linux

But (hazard guess) it comes with a headless CLI binary (no GUI libraries needed) so probably could be ported to Linux (easily with an LLM?)

https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable

There are options on Linux that you can google up (I don't know enough about any of them to endorse them by linking to one in particular).

As I understand it, Windows doesn't expose the necessary low-level hardware information for something like this to be possible.

A quick search found https://github.com/nedrichards/whatcable-linux, haven't tried it myself though

I came here to ask the same thing. I did find a Linux tool with the same name and purpose but that seems to be an entirely different codebase: https://github.com/nedrichards/whatcable-linux

I have a handful of wireless keyboards that just absolutely refuse to negotiate for charging with certain cables at all, so I'm hoping this will help me at least figure out what those keyboards are looking for in terms of cable.

I'd recommend a wireless CarPlay adapter. I bought one for my car, and it's a game-changer.

I see other folks provided options, in case you want to avoid aliexpress, this one worked for me for the past 4 years

https://a.co/d/0d9EOGRW

Does require a bit of setup, can scan reviews to see if people have optimized a config for your specific vehicle

This adapter works with my Android phone and makes my Android Auto wireless: https://aliexpress.com/item/1005008214786824.html

But it is the second product I tried; the first one didn't work (it's a 2020 Stellantis car). So, YMMV.

I was trying to figure out slow network speeds one day and I finally swapped an ethernet cable and got full speed.

It turns out some ethernet cables are missing wires - and capped at 100Mbps! Wait what? I didn't even know that was a thing. I don't know where I got the wire, but into the trash it goes.

If you can afford it, I'd honestly throw these out. "Charging only" is not a spec-compliant thing in USB-C, and personally I wouldn't want to re-discover which devices do and don't support them every time I just want to quickly grab a cable.

What's less easy to replace are all these damn USB-C devices lacking the UFP-identifying circuitry that only work on USB-A chargers using A-to-C cables...

I would recommend getting one of the small cable testers, like the one from Treedix. Gives you all sorts of information very quickly, including resistance levels and capabilities.

> Actual maximum data throughput is very hard to know. The only way to really "know" how much data can flow through a cable is with an expensive oscilloscope or cable tester.

Couldn't you just do a data transfer test over the cable and check the error rate? At least in theory, the controller might not report enough I guess.

While I totally agree if you want to truly know the quality of the signal you need a very expensive box to actually measure the tiny deviations, if the question is "can this thing send and receive 80Gbit of data", can't you just get a couple of USB4 chips or whatever and have one send a pattern at that throughput and have the other try and receive and confirm that pattern? That would give you a basic "yes/know" kind of answer of "can it send XGbit?" I agree the processing capacity for such a thing isn't likely to be $40, but probably a good bit less than >$15k.

I don't need to precisely measure exactly how messed up the signal is to know if the HDMI cable works or not at a given resolution, I'll see the TV have issues displaying a picture, for example. Either the picture is there reliably or its not. I'm not trying to fine tune the cable, I'm just trying to see if it generally works or not.

As for testing power delivery, its not that electrically complicated to put a few amps through a wire for a few minutes. That said, the user must be aware if the cable isn't up to the standards that the chip states you could have some serious issues on your hands, but I guess better to find out on the tester at the workbench or desk than at your bedside.