I don’t know much about cables so if type something wrong forgive me …

I was wondering around with some old stuff, and found this cable that is usb to usb “as shown in the image below”

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71hHpyqvvnS._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_FMwebp_.jpg

Now what i thought was that it might be used to connect 2 computers with each other so i tried that and connected 2 computers with each other using it and nothing happened Can anyone tell me what this cable is even used for ???

  • kuneho@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I had a cable like this, it was for an ancient Medion digital camera. No idea why they went with the full size USB female socket on the device, but it was just a simple USB cable that had male plugs on each end. Maybe it was cheaper, maybe it had debug purposes… we will never know.

    I also tried to connect two PCs with it, it was my very first thought when I saw that cable. Obviously, it didn’t work, nothing happened. Remember Total Commander had a “Connect two computers with USB” feature, was thinking maybe that will work with it, but nope… for that, a specialized USB cable/device was needed, not the one I had for the camera.

  • KHTangent@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It was used to power the Vive Wireless Adapter. I’ve also seen a Steelseries keyboard which used this cable type.

    It’s not widely used, but it’s nice to be able to buy one

  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’ve used these while developing consumer electronics. One product had only a single USB port, and it acted in device mode during bootup for debugging purposes before switching to host mode so it could talk to peripheral devices.

  • TubeTalkerX@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I use a cable like that to link two Car dvd players that are in the back seat. One’s the player with the disc in it and the other is just a viewer, both hang from the front seat head-rests.

  • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    Image isn’t working for me. Is it male-male? A lot of perepherals used to use those. If it’s female-male it’s just an extension.

  • Nollij@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Connect 2 computers together to do what, exactly? The most common answers (e.g. sharing files) are all network-based. This cable definitely does not create a network connection

    • Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The USB protocol can indeed handle file transfers, not sure why windows by default wouldn’t have support. But when you plug in a phone or hard drive/thumb drive by USB the first thing it asks is if you want to transfer files.

      There is absolutely no reason why you wouldn’t also want to file transfer between two computers, or say a laptop and a desktop. Just isn’t supported by default, but there is software that can give you that feature.

      Edit: it looks like in order to get windows to do a USB file transfer by default, the cable itself needs to have an identifying chip. So that windows doesn’t use one of the default protocols and try to transfer power as well. I guess there’s just no support for computers to identify themselves, it’s assumed they will always be the host device and just passively wait for the device on the other end to identify itself. So the software just adds the ability to set one computer as a USB client and identify itself.

    • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Why would it kill the port? I think the power lines would be at equal voltages on both ends and the data lines just wouldn’t do anything.

      • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        Not exactly equal. One will try to feed to another which can kill it. It’s not made to be connected like this. Maybe they could even fight if it tries to compensate by increasing voltage.

        But hopefully there’s some protection that disables the USB port before something ugly happens.

        • safesyrup@feddit.ch
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          1 year ago

          This is entirely dependent on how the circuitry is set up. However USB voltage is always 5 volts and the controller doesn‘t go over that.