Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Have I been doing this the expensive way for no reason?”.
Take your PC and put it in another room. It really is a surprisingly elegant solution with a lot of upsides noise and temperature. All of a sudden are non-factors. You don’t need to worry about your system, getting filled with all the dust you produce just by existing and for bonus points. You can throw everything in a rack just to flex your mad it status, however, to get peripherals like your mouse and your keyboard, your webcam, your thumb drives working well you’re, going to need some way to bridge the USB Gap that now exists between your machine and You now these icron docks over here.
These things are fantastic, but the thing that’s not fantastic about them is the price. So what about all those cheaper Solutions out there? How do they compete for speed and distance wow, the manner they operate in and how well they function might actually surprise you, even if you’re not surprised to hear this segue to our sponsor the ridge. The ridge has partnered up with Hennessy performance. To give you a chance to win amazing prizes like a Hennessy, Ford, Bronco or 75 000 cash, you get one entry for every dollar spent on the ridge products or up to a thousand entries for every dollar spent on custom. Hennessy products use the link below and get 10 bonus entries, even if the details are complicated.
The function of the icon, USB Raven 3124 is pretty easy to explain under normal circumstances. Your USB port has some conductors in it, let’s say four or nine or in the case of USBC, some more those connect to wires when you plug in and transmit a signal over those wires to whatever your target device is here. We take those wires and we plug them into the back of one of these boxes. Some encoding happens here: it transmits that encoded data over fiber optic or Cat6, a cable to a receiver which decodes the data and then reconstructs it back to the original USB signal. At least we’re pretty sure that’s how it works, since that would explain both the xilinx fpgas that we found at the heart of both of these units, as well as their astronomical price tag. Since the only thing we think it would reasonably be doing is handling the encoding and decoding that’s associated with going from USB to another type of data transmission with fiber.
This system can do up to 200 meters or a hundred meters on copper, which is significantly farther than the standard range of three meters for USB 3.1 gen, 1 or 5 meters for USB 2.. But you don’t need to have an expensive fpga powered device in order to break those limits. Take this Corning Optical, USB cable, for example.
These are available lengths of up to 50 meters, which last I checked, is a lot more than three, and they need only a tiny electrical to Optical conversion chip on each side to take that USB data and transmit it long distances over fiber. However, while they definitely have some advantages over the icons like – oh, I don’t know, say, for example, size. They also have some disadvantages like price yeah they’re, not actually really that much of a better deal and on top of that they’re not easily serviceable in the field. So the length you have is the length you get and, as it turns out USB 2 and USB 3, they are not the same thing. You hook this USB 3 cable up to a USB 2 device. You are Plum out of luck.
I mean to its credit at least the cable is a lot more durable, so it’s less likely to get broken in your walls, walls, speaking of walls, if your house looks anything like this with Cat6 or even Cat5e, cables buried in them and you’re, okay with USB 2.0 speeds and a distance limit of 50 meters. There are a lot of very economical options for this meet the esku USB extender, easy cool. It doesn’t matter.
The point is: it’s only 60 on Amazon which, despite being the same price as our upcoming stubby screwdriver, on LTT, store it transmits USB over copper, but wait a minute if it’s using copper, what makes it different than any standard USB cable. Why can’t you just make a USB cable longer? Well, you see it’s the same thing that makes any active, cable different. It uses a hub to act as a repeater. Now, typically, this would be a self-powered hub which the esku is, but unpowered will actually do just fine here so long as it does. What every other unpowered Hub seems to do, and it lies to the host system about its unpowered nature.
The script says this is the part where we could try to build it ourselves. What oh, oh, is this thing really that simple it’s just pin to pin? Oh no! No! So you take that you take this and you take a hub and theoretically, this should work. Really, however, it doesn’t it didn’t quite function, but it could definitely see that there was a USB device being plugged in 50 feet away after some Shenanigans. Maybe the editor will show you on our security cameras.
We have got this working, which is great, because this is a pretty cool demo. What you’re looking at here is a little board that has a USB port on it, some commodity, Electronics, wiring, and they are hooked up to a keystone jack. The reason this is important is because I’m going to show you guys how we can make this for ourselves. All we’ve got to do is take a USB a to a cable plug that into our computer, plug that into our USB port.
Okay, then we take any cable right because copper is copper in it. Go like this plug another standard, USB cable into the other side, and then oh connect it to a powered Hub and theoretically, all we have to do is plug in some USB device and oh, it works it’s alive, which raises some questions. If all we need is a cheap powered Hub and a couple of like keystones, why exactly is anybody spending sixty dollars on this? You actually don’t know, do you? Is there a good? Is there isn’t it? I guess? No. I really have no idea, especially when there’s Alternatives we’ll get into that in a minute. I guess going off script here.
How far can we go, though? What is this one? I said this was 35 feet right 10 meters, that is well past. What even USB 2 can do here we go. Are we going to get mouse? Oh hey, yeah.
We got something. We got something. We got an error.
It’S too far, both from a signaling and from a power perspective. There’S just a limit to how far you can push these things. That is where these come in, or maybe something like it but less expensive. What is it with Tanner and Linus USB experiments? Lately? I don’t get it involved. I do plan to talk about these in a moment, but first, let’s actually validate that the ease coup does perform better than our DIY solution.
Here’S our 10 meter, cable back all right. Here’S some power to our hub is ease coup better than Linus, oh wow, yep. Already worked better, everything worked perfectly, but does it work as advertised? Can we go farther than 10 meters? What’S the biggest cable, you got oh cool. It’S that’s two cables, there’s three cables.
Oh God! I just kept adding cables on until it stopped working. Okay! Well, how long is this one uh? This is 50 meters. Why don’t we try within spec? First all right. This reminds me of some of the old. Like Wi-Fi range test videos we did in the NCIX parking lot except USB range and there’s no parking lot. Although I think we could reach the parking lot with this, if we really wanted to let’s see if it works, wow, okay, all right, okay, okay, this is worth contextualizing.
Let’S talk about just how far 50 meters is well, we got ta, go we’re going this way. 60, bucks, hey kind of, seems like a value. Should we see if we can make it to Creator Warehouse? You said you had more cables attached to this. Did it still work? Yes, good gravy? None of us are still back at the studio to uh.
Well, the screen cap is running and if the mouse is moving right now, then imagine that we’re doing like a dude, perfect, yeah yeah come on because you celebrate: why don’t we get on a call? Why don’t you run in there and then we’ll uh call and then I’ll be right back, because I need more cable, uh Andrew you wait here sure: okay, is it working yeah? No, oh! No! No just kidding it’s not plugged in you saw something setting up a device fire surge. Oh yeah move it down to the start, menu where it is on sensible computers, you’re a top ped bar guy explained. Oh, if I was wearing a high Vis, vest or something this would be fine here we go we’re gon na try to make it all the way to Creator Warehouse over 200 feet. We’Re testing again is the mouse plugged in yes, I’m gaming. Am I clicking on anything? Is this useful yeah, you just selecting a bunch of things uh.
I am flipping impressed and there is no shortage of devices just like this. That can be had for around this cost but, as I alluded to before, if all you need is a keyboard and mouse running, you don’t even necessarily need USB 2. So we can go down even more for price.
Let’S show you what we’ve got next, this little Monoprice number, which came recommended by Wendell, does have some disadvantages. It only has a single female port on this side, for example – and I already told you guys it’s dog slow, but it requires no power on either side. Also can run up to 50 meters Tanner. Can you confirm I can confirm and it costs just 25 – actually no 25, where the heck were you shopping for this, I’m on monoprice’s website and it is twelve dollars. Yeah comes in a two pack. Well, never mind! You won’t be fast charging your phone with one of these anytime soon, but given the lengths that they can run at while being able to use category network cables that are so ubiquitous, they practically grow on trees.
The possibilities are practically endless for these things. The networking cables in your wall truly are a wonderful thing, and, while the real world applications of having your mouse 50 meters away from your computer might be fairly limited, twisted pair is really just that Twisted pairs of copper cables and they don’t care what’s running through Them whether it’s USB HDMI network audio, in fact in our new building, that we’re building out we’re just putting RJ45 terminations everywhere, the speakers are we’re not sure if we’re going to use IP speakers or regular speakers. But at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter. It’S just copper.
You can actually even get pre-made ethernet to all kinds of different terminations like XLR or RCA, and as long as you follow the same pin out uh. I mean it’s not here anymore, but you guys saw it. You can even mix and match to build your own cables being copper. However, there are some downsides.
Metal cables are much more susceptible to electromagnetic interference, for example, now in most homes and small businesses, that’s not going to be a huge issue, but for some it might be distance, as we’ve already discussed, is also a factor depending on the strength of your transceivers Optical. Can go much farther than what is practical, with copper, cabling and, as I discussed before, if you need performance you’re going to need to go for something a little more exotic for everyone else, though. A simple, cheap solution from Monoprice Prime cables or even as cool yep. Even you should work just fine and if neither of those suit your fancy – and in fact you don’t even care about extending your cables at all, maybe you’d prefer this message from our sponsor Nord security.
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It’S not on our Channel, I’m not going to get any AD Revenue, but it’s definitely got a similar vibe. .