alt Hacker News> 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.
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?
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.
OK sure your 6 figures thing or even that 20k thing are way better testers than the Treedix. But for my use case, i.e. verify what's actually in the cable (not blindly trusting the marker) the latter is sufficient and very ergonomic, and the "real" testers are overkill.