The only wrinkles for me are that Macs apparently don't interrogate cables when they don't have to, i.e., when the power adapter supplies <= 60W (not sure if that's a USB-C protocol or an Apple implementation limitation) and that the website copy is full of GPT-isms, which makes me suspect that some of the output might be assumed instead of empirically validated as well.
Would this tell me if a cable is close to the end of it's life? I like to travel light and I've had cables (mostly phone/pad power) go out on trips after working as expected when I packed.
I think you would need something that tracks relevant per cable metrics over time to see if it is degrading.
That one just says yes/no, but maybe yes/no starts to flicker around its end of life?
I literally spent more than an hour yesterday debugging issues with USB-C cables that I wasn't aware were charging only, and this shows up today... Better late than never, I suppose, and definitely worth my ten quid.
If you can afford it, I'd honestly throw these out. "Charging only" is not a spec-compliant thing in USB-C, and personally I wouldn't want to re-discover which devices do and don't support them every time I just want to quickly grab a cable.
What's less easy to replace are all these damn USB-C devices lacking the UFP-identifying circuitry that only work on USB-A chargers using A-to-C cables...
To be clear, they're not literally "charging only", AIUI they're spec-compliant cables with USB2.0 480Mbps and power delivery, and they're allowed to not have the four SuperSpeed wire pairs. They're still useful for low bandwidth devices (like charging my keyboard/mouse).
Incidentally — I spent an inordinate amount of time searching for USB3.2 cables on Amazon, and the vast majority of cables were actually just USB2.0 cables with PD support, and not actual Full-Featured cables.
I'm curious if this also works for USB-A to USB-C. The use case: My Suburu has USB-A inputs and only allows wired Carplay. When I upgraded my iPhone and ditched Lightning, I had to try 6 different cables from my cable drawer to find one that supported data transfer.
I have so many cables I've accumulated over the years, I should either purge or at least categorize the functionality of each.
I came here to ask the same thing. I did find a Linux tool with the same name and purpose but that seems to be an entirely different codebase: https://github.com/nedrichards/whatcable-linux
I have a handful of wireless keyboards that just absolutely refuse to negotiate for charging with certain cables at all, so I'm hoping this will help me at least figure out what those keyboards are looking for in terms of cable.
The only wrinkles for me are that Macs apparently don't interrogate cables when they don't have to, i.e., when the power adapter supplies <= 60W (not sure if that's a USB-C protocol or an Apple implementation limitation) and that the website copy is full of GPT-isms, which makes me suspect that some of the output might be assumed instead of empirically validated as well.
I have a basket with a lot of USB-c cables and without the tester I can't remember (nor guess) which one does what.
What's less easy to replace are all these damn USB-C devices lacking the UFP-identifying circuitry that only work on USB-A chargers using A-to-C cables...
Incidentally — I spent an inordinate amount of time searching for USB3.2 cables on Amazon, and the vast majority of cables were actually just USB2.0 cables with PD support, and not actual Full-Featured cables.
I have so many cables I've accumulated over the years, I should either purge or at least categorize the functionality of each.
https://github.com/nedrichards/whatcable-linux
But (hazard guess) it comes with a headless CLI binary (no GUI libraries needed) so probably could be ported to Linux (easily with an LLM?)
https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable
As I understand it, Windows doesn't expose the necessary low-level hardware information for something like this to be possible.
I have a handful of wireless keyboards that just absolutely refuse to negotiate for charging with certain cables at all, so I'm hoping this will help me at least figure out what those keyboards are looking for in terms of cable.