GaN Charger Teardown Reveals Value Of This New Technology

Every so often, a new technology comes along that offers a broad range of benefits over what we already have. Just as lithium-ion batteries have made nickel-cadmium cells boring and old hat, galliu…

Is Your USB-C Dock Out To Hack You?

In today’s installment of Betteridge’s law enforcement, here’s an evil USB-C dock proof-of-concept by [Lachlan Davidson] from [Aura Division]. We’ve seen malicious USB devic…

A Mega-Tiny Arduino

Integrated circuits, chipsets, memory modules, and all kinds of other transistor-based technology continues to get smaller, cheaper, and more energy efficient as time moves on. Not only are the com…

All About USB-C: Replying Low-Level PD

Last time, we configured the FUSB302 to receive USB PD messages, and successfully received a “capability advertisement” message from a USB-C PSU. Now we crack the PD specification open,…

Running The Xbox Series S On A USB Powerbank

Home consoles were never intended to be made portable, though enterprising hackers have always pushed the boundaries with various tricks and innovative builds. [Robotanv] hasn’t built a fully…

All About USB-C: Talking Low-Level PD

In this USB-C series, we’ve covered quite a bit of USB-C – things that are well known, things that should be  better known, and a couple things that just appeared online for the first t…

All About USB-C: Manufacturer Sins

People experience a variety of problems with USB-C. I’ve asked people online about their negative experiences with USB-C, and got a wide variety of responses, both on Twitter and on Mastodon.…

All About USB-C: Pinecil Soldering Iron

As many people have pointed out, what matters with USB-C isn’t just the standard, it’s the implementations. After all, it’s the implementations that we actually have to deal with,…

All About USB-C: Framework Laptop

Talking about high-quality USB-C implementations, there’s a product that has multiple selling points designed around USB-C, and is arguably a shining example of how to do USB-C right. It&#821…

All About USB-C: High-Speed Interfaces

One amazing thing about USB-C is its high-speed capabilities. The pinout gives you four high-speed differential pairs and a few more lower-speed pairs, which let you pump giant amounts of data thro…

All About USB-C: Power Delivery

USB-C eliminates proprietary barrel plug chargers that we’ve been using for laptops and myriads of other devices. It fights proprietary phone charger standards by explicitly making them non-c…

All About USB-C: Resistors And Emarkers

If you’ve been following along our USB-C saga, you know that the CC wire in the USB-C cables is used for communications and polarity detection. However, what’s not as widely known is th…

AIOC: The Ham Radio All-In-One Cable For Audio And APRS

The Ham Radio All-in-one cable (AIOC) is a small PCB attachment for a popular series of radio transceivers which adds a USB-attached audio interface and virtual TTY port for programming and the pus…

Use USB-C Chargers To Top Up Li-Ion Packs With This Hack

In USB-C Power Delivery (PD) standard, the PPS (Programmable Power Supply) mode is an optional mode that lets you request a non-standard voltage from a charger, with the ability to set a current li…

Dirty USB-C Tricks: One Port For The Price Of Two

[RichardG] has noticed a weird discrepancy – his Ryzen mainboard ought to have had fourteen USB3 ports, but somehow, only exposed thirteen of them. Unlike other mainboards in this lineup, it …

All About USB-C: Illegal Adapters

Let’s be clear – it’s not enough to have USB-C to USB-C cables. There’s a lot of cables that we might want to acquire for our day-to-day use, perhaps, for a transition perio…

All About USB-C: Connector Mechanics

There’s two cases when hackers have to think about USB-C connector mechanics. The first is when a USB-C connector physically breaks, and the second is when we need to put a connector on our o…

All About USB-C: Cable Types

USB-C cables and connectors: these are controversial topics, and rightfully so – I don’t want to pull any punches. I will also show you that things don’t have to be that bad for y…

USB-C: Introduction For Hackers

We’ve now had at least five years of USB-C ports in our devices. It’s a standard that many manufacturers and hackers can get behind. Initially, there was plenty of confusion about what …