Converting devices to USB Type-C

USB is the universal way to connect

devices

until recently, anyway the move to USB

type

-c has meant that some

devices

now only use USB

type

-c like this laptop, it is exclusively USB type-c and there is no way to connect USB type a. devices unless a dongle is used and this has meant that we are in a sort of awkward transition phase where some devices use USB type-c and others just don't want to upgrade and that is not a solution. In this video, I'll show you how to convert older USB Type A devices to Type C devices.

It's not particularly difficult, but it should be pretty accurate, so let's get to it. USB has been around for over 20 years. years and has had quite a few updates throughout its life, the first version of USB introduced the connector that we are all familiar with and inside it featured a pair of cables for power and another pair for data, it is considered a host port, so the other end of a cable terminates either in the device being connected or in a sub-connector known as a USB Type B port which you may have seen on a printer or scanner when USB 2.0 came out shortly after, it kept the same wiring configuration internal but increased transfer speeds 40 times and introduced a pair of subconnectors for connecting smaller devices.

USB 3.0, on the other hand, brought the first wiring change to the standard, as it introduced more pairs of data transfer cables, greatly increasing transfer speeds again and to maintain backward compatibility. They added extra sections to the subconnectors so that devices could still use older USB cables, although at the cost of speed. As you can see, it has evolved a lot over the years and has become a bit of a complicated mess of different types of connectors. In an effort to consolidate things, the standard has introduced a new host connector known as USB type-c. It offers some interesting advantages as it is much smaller and can be plugged in either way, plus it has some serious power supply options, which is more interesting.

The important thing is that you can also replace all the sub connectors and eventually most devices will have this new connector regardless of whether it is a host or a sub device and whether it is for charging or charging, it is super vertical and I am looking forward to it . but right now, like I said, you're probably going to have a lot of devices that use any of the previous generations, so we're going to push these older devices into the new era of USB type-c, so the first device I'm going to show you how to convert it.

In fact, it is a mouse. Now this is a fairly high end mouse that was purchased a few years ago and still works fine to this day except the receiver is a USB type which means I can't. Use it on my laptop without the stupid dongle. Now the manufacturer, for some reason, does not yet make a USB type-c version of this receiver, so let's convert it now to do this. The first thing you need to do is get to the PCB inside, which for a device as small as this, needs to be done by opening the USB connector.

Now that we're inside, you can see that the PCB is very small and it has four copper traces, these copper traces. It fits into a USB type port to make electrical contact, so from this diagram we can determine which ones these two external ones do for power and the two internal ones are for data. Now we need a USB C breakout board. This is basically just a USBC. Connector that has been soldered to a small PCB, allowing us to connect its internal pins. It is absolutely small and economical. You can find links to them in the description of this video, as you can see that their own soldering pads are labeled B 10 B 11 a 7 a 6.

A 3 and a 2, these labels correspond to various pins on the type connector. C and I'll break it down through the process so that at the end you understand what the first ones will look like on our a7 and a6. These are four USB 2.0 connections, so they are the first routes we need to connect four basic devices like my mouse. For this step we will need a soldering iron and some solder. Most of us will already have one of these or know someone who does. If not, they're pretty inexpensive at your local hardware store, so the first thing you need to do is add some solder to a seven and a six, after which they'll be ready for us to connect some wires.

A good source for this is actually an old USB Cable, since most of us have a lot of these lying around, we can use some wire cutters to cut it open and take out the little wires inside as a general rule in the USB world, the green and white are the data cables for USB. 2.0, so we can expose the ends of these again with the wire cutters and apply a little more solder, since a six corresponds to positive data, you can have a green wire connected, while a seven needs a white wire like negative data returning to the mouse receiver we saw from previous observation that this one has negative data and requires the white wire, while the other has positive data and requires the green wire.

Now on the other side of the breakout board there are two more solder pads, one labeled ground g4 and the other voltage v4, these are the negative and positive power pads, so we can solder the red and black wire to these and again, by observation, determine which pads on the receiver they should connect to. Once this is done you are theoretically ready to test but first check your connections to be sure it was done correctly and as with everything proceed at your own risk now in all likelihood when you do this you will be disappointed because you don't nothing will happen and the device will not be detected.

This is because USB C requires the connected device to tell it whether it is a host or sub-device, and for some reason the vast majority of USB C breakout boards currently available seem to be configured to be host devices rather than sub-devices. , it is all due to the resistance applied to the internal pins a5 and b5 of a USB C connector if their voltage is stepped up from the power line through a resistor, each will act as a host device if their voltage is stepped down across from a resistor to ground, it acts as a sub Device that looks very closely at the board, we can see this resistance and it is actually drawing more power from the voltage panel.

If we scrape the trace to disconnect it, we can replace its function with a 1 kilo ohm five point resistor that goes to ground instead, now I used a 4.7 kilo ohm resistor here, but despite this, luckily it worked fine when plugged in the mouse works perfectly and is now USB type-c natively, now having all the cables exposed with the PCB hanging out looks horrible however, and would break very very quickly so to rectify this, I recommend molding a small case with sugru. It's available in many different colors so you can customize things to your liking and I chose Apple Green as you group things together.

Make sure you don't short any connections by pushing them against the outer casing of the USBC plug and make sure you gently squish the sugru between them, this will keep them secure and make it nice and sturdy once it's placed in hard rubber. It looks a bit homemade, but the thing is, this is the first USB Type-C receiver for this mouse and it works great, so I'm very happy with it now. It still sticks out a little, so I won. I don't want to leave it plugged in during transport, for example, but it's much better than the adapter that comes with the laptop and even if you have a smaller adapter that doesn't have a cable attached like this one, it's still significantly smaller by comparison. so I would say it's a big success and not bad at all.

Now this little hack or mod, so to speak, is not limited to just

converting

things for laptops like USB receivers, but you can also use it for a variety of different devices, for example. I have this Fleur One thermal camera and it is actually designed to connect to smartphones, however it was made a few years ago and still uses the older micro B connector so unfortunately I can't connect it to my newer phone unless I use another dumb dongle. So in an effort to get to the USB connector, I can simply remove the back and unscrew the board to lift it up and set it aside safely.

For now, interestingly, the USB connector board is completely separate, which makes my job a little easier. However, the first task here is to determine which pins represent power and ground to do this. I connected it to my old phone to measure some pins with a multimeter and find out which ones show as 5 volts with them charged. I can now remove the internal connector pins and solder a new red and black wire that matches the configuration of the previous connector boards. Now there is no easy way to measure which pins are for positive and negative data, so I just took a guess and soldered them in the same order they would be on a USB connector.

I can always change this later as they are unlikely to cause any damage, although again, this is at your own risk. The other end of this can now be soldered to another breakout board and instead used. a complete one. In fact, I'm going to use a cropped version. This only provides the data panels for positive and negative data, excluding all USB 3.0 related paths which, by the way, we'll explore later, but this is a lot of devices. so I thought I'd include it here as an example as it's a bit easier to solder thanks to the increased space between the pads again, although my board here needs the resistor changed to one that goes to the ground pad to make it I'm sure that it's set to super device mode, although the layout is a little different here so I'll have to clean the resistor completely with the soldering iron instead of just scraping off its connection trace once all the wires are soldered according to your colors are ready to be reassembled before doing this, although it is necessary to increase the size of the connector hole so that it can fit through it, after which everything can be carefully reassembled and sure enough it now works with my new phone without a problem, so an old device has been given new life and even a new feature has been added because the USB type-c is of course reversible, meaning it can be connected upside down so you can take thermal selfies, which is a cool thing now, before we go ahead and show you the latest device to convert, which is a USB 3.0 device, it's time for a quick announcement from Linkous these days, with so many distractions at our disposal. around, it's often quite difficult to just sit down and learn something new. and because of this, we often miss out on the deeper knowledge found in well-researched books.

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I like to use it so I don't really want to get rid of it and buy a new one and the same with the thermal camera it works fine, I just needed a different connector, however this third device I'm going to show you it doesn't really make much sense because it's a hub USB 3.0 and a card reader and are not as expensive to buy as USBC version and if you don't want to buy a new one. You can always use an adapter because being connected to a cable it's not too bothersome anyway, however it is USB 3.0 so I'll just use it as an example to show you how to convert a USB 3.0 device.

Now, the first thing you should do. Actually, what you need to do is cut off the end. This may seem a little extreme, but it is the only way to access the cables, of which, as you can see, there are twice as many. This is because it has two more pairs of data transfer cables, as I mentioned above. which are yellow, blue, purple and orange, everything else about this conversion is the same as the previous two, so after changing the resistor and soldering the positive and negative power and data wires, it can technically work as is , although only at a lower speed.USB 2.0 Speeds In order for this to work at full speed, we need to solder the extra wire pairs in place as it acts as a secondary device, the yellow blue function as super speed transmit and the purple orange function as super speed receive, basically this means the purple ghost beat n orange to be 11, blue for a3 and yellow for a to any open ground wire that can be twisted and connected to the ground pad now to protect all of this an alternative to Subaru is Using two component epoxy, making it a very sturdy case with a smooth finish again, this works brilliantly and the USB 3.0 functionality allows for incredibly fast transfer speeds.

A side note is that this will work with a USBC phone and will also allow you to connect additional peripherals and storage, this really shows. how fantastic USB Type C is and that it is definitely the future, so I hope you have success creating your own USB C devices now. In fact, I really liked that the USB Type C connection is much better than USB Type A and I'm looking for it. I hope there comes a time when everything is USB Type C so this won't be necessary, but until then I hope this video closes the gap.

Many thanks to my patrons who support my work on patreon.com. Reduce the advantages of DIY. You are incredible. Thank you very much and in terms of the next project I could do a lot of recording, we are in lockdown and a lot of people are working from home and webcams are apparently in short supply so I was wondering if you want me to show you how to turn an old laptop into a webcam , as if they removed the module. use the laptop, so you would literally make the webcam yourself. This is something I've covered in other videos, but I'm wondering if you'd like me to revisit the topic and specifically create a webcam, so let me know in the comments below. but other than that, I'm Matt, I've been seeing DIY benefits and I hope to see you next time, bye for now.