Build A USB-C Power Delivery Sniffer
A DIY Google Twinkie Sniffer
As many people have discovered, not all USB-C cords are the same. Your device might be capable of delivering 90W of power but the cord you plug in might not handle anything near that. This generally just results in poor charging behaviour, which is annoying enough as it is, but has previously lead to fires when a cord is asked to handle far more wattage than it is capable of.
There are USB-C power delivery sniffers you can buy on the market, but they are not inexpensive and are limited in their functionality. This project over at Hackaday describes how you can build your own sniffer from relatively inexpensive parts. As the entire design is open source, an enterprising maker could add functionality to it, to be able to test issues with data transfer, video passthrough or even redesign it to test Thunderbolt cables. The full project files can be found there if you are interested in building one for yourself.
USB-C Power Delivery is just one of many protocols spoken over the CC pins, and the FreshTwinkie might be able to detect when some of those are enabled and why or why not. With future development, it could potentially provide useful information as to why a Thunderbolt 4 or tunneled PCIe device isn’t working correctly.
More Tech News From Around The Web
- Nvidia intros the ‘SuperNIC’ – it’s like a SmartNIC, DPU or IPU, but more super @ The Register
- New botnet malware exploits two zero-days to infect NVRs and routers @ Bleeping Computer
- Microsoft’s Windows Hello Fingerprint Authentication Has Been Bypassed @ Slashdot
- Microsoft unleashes Copilot preview on Windows 10 insiders @ The Register
- USB Worm Unleashed By Russian State Hackers Spreads Worldwide @ Slashdot
- Sam Altman wins power struggle, returns to OpenAI with new board @ Ars Technica
Does it output a hash file of the results or can you see in real time?