Terrible USB Type-C cable fries engineer’s Chromebook Pixel

It’s easy to take cables for granted and aim for the least expensive ones, but as Leung has shown on multiple occasions, these seemingly simple accessories aren’t all built the same.

When Leung plugged it in and powered his devices on, he found that not only had his Chromebook Pixel’s USB ports been completed fried, making them unusable, but he’d also lost two USB power analyzers that were attached to the same line. From the beginning, Leung made it clear that bad USB-C cables could damage our mobile devices, something he’s just managed to prove at the expense of his Chromebook Pixel 2. To put it simply, Surjtech totally miswired the cable, which would undoubtedly fry any electronics. When the Pixel was rebooted, it went to recovery mode as the Embedded Controller could not be verified.

Google software engineer Benson Leung has been testing and reviewing the various third-party USB Type C cables that are sold on Amazon and other vendors for the past few months.

In a follow up post, Leung linked to his review of Surjtech’s 3M USB A-to-C cable and included some more specifics as to the damage it caused. In fact, one crusading Google engineer who hoped to name and shame Amazon sellers shifting dodgy cables, has found one particularly bad one that fried his Chromebook during testing. “Upon closer analysis, serious damage has been done to components related to charging and managing the USB Type-C port’s capabilities”. The GND pin on the Type-A plug is tied to the Vbus pins on the Type-C plug.

The damaging cable has since been removed from Amazon, although the review remains. Most of us have a drawer full of microUSB cables, but many people will be looking to pickup some Type-C cables on the cheap soon. This includes a 10 kΩ resistor used instead of 56 kΩ resistor, and the resistor was hooked up as a pull-down instead of a pull-up. “The Vbus pin on the Type-A plug is tied to GND on the Type-C plug”, Leung explained. Needless to say, he gave it one star and recommends no one buys it. Leung says he’ll contact the manufacturer directly, and in the meantime he probably won’t be reviewing any cables until he replaces his equipment. The latest generation of USB cables might be universal and capable of delivering much more power to our devices, but not all of them are working as intended.