Converting devices to USB Type-C

USB the universal way to connect the devices together until recently anyway the move to USB type-c has meant that some devices now just use USB type-c like this laptop it's exclusively USB type-c and there's no way to plug in USB type a devices unless a dongle is used and this has meant that we're in a sort of awkward transitional phase where some devices use USB type-c of devices don't and some you just don't want to upgrade and that's not a solution so in this video i'm going to be showing you how to convert the older USB type a devices into being type c it's not particularly difficult but you're doing to be quite precise so let's get to it USB has been around for well over 20 years and has had quite a few updates through its lifetime the first version of USB introduced the connector that we're all familiar with and inside featured a pair of wires for power and another pair for data it's considered a host port so the other end of a cable is either terminated at the device that's being plugged in or at 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 along soon afterwards it kept the same internal wiring configuration but increased transfer speeds by 40 times and introduced a couple of sub connectors for connecting smaller devices USB 3.0 on the other hand brought the first wiring change to the standard as it introduced to more data transfer wire pairs this vastly increased transfer speeds again and to maintain backwards compatibility they tacked on additional sections to the sub connectors so that devices could still use older USB cables though at the cost of speed so as you can see it's evolved a lot over the years and has become a bit of a complicated mess of different connector types so in an effort to consolidate things the standard has introduced a new host connector known as USB type-c it offers some nice advantages in that it's much smaller and can be plugged in either way around as well as having some serious power delivery options what's most interesting about it is that it can actually replace all of the sub connectors too and eventually most devices will have this new connector regardless of whether it's a host or a sub device and for either charging or being charged that's super vertical and I'm looking forward to it but at the moment as I said you will probably have a lot of devices that use any of the previous generations so we're going to jumpstart these older devices into the new era of the USB type-c so the first device I'm going to show you how to convert is in fact a mouse now this is a fairly high-end mouse that was bought a few years ago and it still works fine to this day except for the receiver is USB type aim which means I can't use it on my laptop without the stupid dongle now the manufacturer for some reason doesn't make a USB type-c version of this receiver yet anyway so we're going to convert it now to do this the first thing to do is get to the PCB that's on the inside which for a device as small as this needs to be done by opening up the USB plug itself now that we're in you can see that the PCB is very small and has four copper traces on it these copper traces fit into a USB type a port to make electrical contact so from this diagram we can work out which ones do what these outer two of a power and the inner two are for data we now need a USB C breakout board this is basically just a USBC connector that's been soldered onto a small PCB allowing us to jack into its internal pins it's absolutely tiny and inexpensive and you can find links to them in this video's description as you see its own solder pads are labeled as B 10 B 11 a 7 a 6 a 3 and a 2 these labels correspond to various pins on the type-c connector and I'll be breaking this down throughout do so that by the end of it you should understand what is what the first ones will look at our a7 and a6 these are four USB 2.0 connectivity so are the first paths that we need to connect four basic devices like my mouse for this step we'll need a soldering iron and some solder most of us will either have one of these already or know somebody who does if not they're quite inexpensive from your local hardware store so the first thing to do is add a dab of solder onto a seven and a six after which they're ready for us to attach some wires a good source for this is actually an old USB cable as most of us have plenty of these lying around we can just use some wire cutters to open it soap and pull out the little wires on the inside as a general rule in the USB world green and white are the data wires for USB 2.0 devices so we can expose the ends of these again with the wire cutters and dab on some more solder as a six corresponds to data positive it can have a green wire attached while a seven needs of white wire as its data negative going back to the mouse receiver we saw by observation earlier that this one is data negative requiring the white wire while the other one is data positive requiring the green wire now on the other side of the breakout board there are two more solder pads one being labeled as g4 ground and the other v4 voltage these are the power negative and positive pads so we can solder of red and black wire to these and again by observation work out which pads on the receiver they should connect to with that done it is in theory ready to test out but first double check your connections so that you're sure it's done correctly and as with everything proceed at your own risk now in all likelihood when you do this you will be disappointed because nothing will happen and the device won't be detected this is because USB C requires the plugged in device to tell it whether it is a host or a sub device and for some reason the vast majority of USB C breakout boards currently available appear to be configured to be host devices rather than sub devices this is all down to the resistance applied to a USB C connectors internal pins a5 and b5 if their voltage is pulled up from the power line through a resistor each it will act as a host device if their voltage is pulled down through a resistor to ground it acts as a sub device looking very closely at the board we can actually see this resistor and indeed it is pulling more power from the voltage pad if we scrape away the trace for this to disconnect it we can replace its function with a five point 1 kilo ohm resistor going to ground instead now I actually used a 4.7 kilo ohm resistor here but despite this it thankfully worked just fine when plugged in the mouse works perfectly and is now natively USB type-c now having all the wires exposed with the PCB hanging off looks awful however and would break very very quickly so to rectify this I recommend molding a small case for it out of sugru this is available in plenty of different colors so you can customize things to your liking and I've gone with Apple green as you bundle things together make sure that you don't short any connections out by pushing it against the USBC plugs outer shell and make sure you gently mush the sugru in between the wise this will keep them safe and make it nice and robust once it's set into a hard rubber admittedly it does look a little bit homemade but the thing is this is the first USB type-c receiver ever for this mouse and it does work really well so I'm super happy with it now this does still stick out a little bit so I won't want to leave it connected during transport for example but it is so much better than the adapter that came with the laptop and even if you have a smaller adapter that hasn't got a wire attached like this one in comparison it's still significantly smaller so I would say that's quite success and not bad at all now this little hack or mod if you will is not just limited to converting things for laptops like USB receivers but you can actually use it for a variety of different devices - for example I've got this Fleur one thermal camera and it's actually intended to be plugged into smartphones however it was made a few years ago and still uses the older micro B connector so unfortunately I can't plug it into my newer phone unless I use another silly dongle so in an effort to get at the USB connector I can simply prise off the back and unscrew the board to lift it out putting it safely to one side for now interestingly the USB connector board is completely separate which does make my job a bit easier the first task here though is to work out which pins represent power and ground to do this I've plugged it into my old phone to measure a few pins with a multimeter to find out which ones display as being 5 volts with them loaded down I can now remove the internal connector pins and solder a new red and black wire to it matching the previous connector boards configuration now there's no easy way to measure which pins are for data positive and data negative so I just took a guess and soldered them up in the same order that they would be on a USB connector I can always swap this around later as they're unlikely to cause damage though again this is at your own risk the other end of this can now be soldered to another breakout board and instead of using a full one I'm actually going to use a trimmed-down version this one only provides the data pads for data positive and data negative excluding all USB 3.0 related paths which we will be exploring later by the way but this is all that many devices so I thought I'd include it here as an example as it is a little easier to solder to thanks to the larger spacing in between the pads again though my board here needs the resistor to be changed to one going to the ground pad to make sure that it's configured into super device mode the layout is a little different here though so I'm going to have to wipe the resistor off entirely with the soldering iron rather than just scraping off its connecting trace once all the wires are soldered up according to their colors it's ready to put back together before I do this though is necessary to increase the size of the connectors hole so that it can fit through it after which the whole thing can be carefully reassembled and sure enough it now works with my new phone without a problem so that's given a new lease of life to an old device and it's even added a new feature because USB type-c is of course reversible which means that it can be plugged in the other way around so you can do thermal selfies which is kind of cool now before I move on and show you the last device to convert which is a USB 3.0 device it's time for a quick ad from Linkous these days with so many distractions around us is often quite difficult to just sit down and learn something new and because of this we often miss out on the deeper knowledge that's found in well-researched at the books now if it sounds familiar then I recommend that you check out blink Asst as they take key insights from over 3,000 nonfiction bestsellers and condense them down into 15-minute blinks which help you to understand the core ideas at hand now these can be either read through at your own leisure or even better listened to which is great for when you're perhaps commuting to work or working out now the first hundred of you to visit blink is comm slash DRI perks are going to get access to a free seven-day on a limited access trial which you can cancel at any point so no pressure but if you do decide to go with them you get 25% off which is great value so again that's the link is comm slash DIY X now the devices are showing you how to convert so far like the mouse and the thermal camera they're all devices that weren't really converting because this is a expensive Mouse so it was when it was first bought it's still good I like using it so I don't really want to get rid of it and buy a new one and same with the thermal camera it works fine it just needed a different connector however this third device which I'm going to be showing you don't really make too much sense because it's a USB 3.0 hub and card reader and these aren't that expensive to buy as a USBC version and if you didn't want to buy a new one you could always just use an adapter because being on a wire anyway it's not too obtrusive however it is USB 3.0 so I'm going to be using it just as an example to show you how to convert a USB 3.0 device now the first thing to do is actually chop the end off now this might seem a little bit extreme but it's the only way to access the wires of which as you can see there are twice as many this is because it has two more data transfer wire pairs like I mentioned earlier which are yellow and blue and purple and orange everything else about this conversion is the same as the previous two so after changing the resistor and soldering in place to power and data positive and data negative cables it can technically work as is although only at the slower USB 2.0 speeds to get this thing running at full speed we need to solder the extra wire pairs in place as this is acting as a sub device blue yellow function as super speed transmitted and purple orange function as super speed receive basically this means that purple ghost beat n orange to be 11 blue to a3 and yellow to a to any open ground wires can be twisted together and connected to the ground pad now to protect all of this an alternative to Subaru is to actually use two-part epoxy this makes for a very strong casing for it with a smooth finish again this works brilliantly and the USB 3.0 functionality allows for blazingly fast transfer speeds a side note is that this will work off a USBC phone as well allowing you to plug in extra peripherals and storage this really shows off how awesome USB type-c is and how it is definitely the future so I hope you have success making your own USB C devices now I actually really liked the USB type-c connection is way better than USB type a and I'm looking forward to a time when everything is USB type-c so this isn't necessary but until then hopefully this video will bridge the gap now a big thanks to my patrons who are supporting my work at patreon.com slash DIY perks you guys are awesome so thanks alot and in terms of the next project I might do a ton of recording we are in lockdown and a lot of people are working from home and apparently webcams are in short supply so I was wondering whether you guys want me to show you how to turn an old laptop into a webcam as in taking out the module not using the laptop so you'd literally make the webcam yourself now this is something that I have covered in other videos but I do wonder whether you guys would like me to revisit the topic and make specifically a webcam so let me know in the comments below but other than that I'm Matt he'd been watching DIY perks and I hope to see you next time good bye for now

Channel: DIY Perks

Views: 4,058,569

Rating: 4.8971934 out of 5

Keywords: usb c, usb type c, usb type-c, convert, modify, diy, thunderbolt, solder, electronics

Id: V-vFtiDYiIw

Length: 16min 25sec (985 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/julian_vdm]

Love this guy.

[u/ThWedum]

Hope Logitech soon makes the real deal with usb c

[u/finnathrowthis]

Saw this already too, its amazing!

[u/Believeinsteve]

I mean it'd be cool but my logitech stream cam takes my only c port. So kinda bummer here

[u/TalanelElin]

Are there computers with USB c port?

[u/J05H5M1TH]

Just wish there was a better way to finish it than that green rubber stuff he used. Maybe 3d printing?? Loved the video tho

[u/icyblade_]

I liked this video but I don't understand why he wouldn't just move the resistor over that was already there with the pads beside it to switch. Some flux and a $30 hot Air station and it would have taken 5min not even.

[u/strengr]

this is fucking awesome.

[u/szhaz]

It would be nice if Logitech could enable the Bluetooth connections so that they work well while other Bluetooth Communication Devices are connected.. like headsets and audio.. Then we wouldn't need to have a separate connection for Mouse/Keyboard i/o...