So i have these Rode Wireless Microphones at Work that you connect to your phone with a USB-C cable. Thing is the cable they ship with is absolute trash and breaks after about 3 uses. So i got the idea to try and build a 3d printed thingie with a protruding usb-c port that you could slide onto your phone sort of like the old iphone music docks. Then on the back you could slide in the rode receiver, thus eliminating any cable twisting. I thought this would be easiest if i had the pictured usb-c breakouts, because they have mounting holes that i could fix firmly into the 3d printed part. I picked a 24 pin version thinking this would cover all the necessary usb-c specs to get at least something like a usb 3.0 connection as I don’t think the rode mics need super high data transfer or power delivery above 5v. Alas the pictured “cable” didn’t do the trick and the mic wasn’t recognized by the phone. So I’m wondering would it even be possible to build something like this with breakouts or am I missing things. Do usb-c cables usually have chips that negotiate voltage and transfer specs between devices? Am i missing shielding, or is my wire gauge totally off?

I can probably still build a mic holder thingy using a short premade silicone cable, but I’m still curious if this setup could work in theory or if there are other breakouts that could make this work.

Thanks for your help!

  • Thorry@feddit.org
    17·
    2 days ago

    It’s a very short cable so you might get away with it, but don’t expect this to really work well. You need shielding around data pairs and they need to be twisted. All of the lengths need to be matched pretty closely as well. The soldering looks suboptimal, with too much solder added.

    You are right that a lot of USB-C cables include chips to handle all sorts of things, but depending on the application this isn’t required.

    I would just get a pre-made cable, they are cheap and available in all shapes and sizes. Breaking out data cables like this is pretty difficult (unless we are talking like 9600 baud RS-232/485). Modern data cables are like impossible engineering feats. It’s just because we use so many of them and we have machines to make a lot of them quickly, that they are as cheap as they are.