this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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I found it at the dollar store.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 56 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Such A-to-A adaptors and cables always have been prohibited by the USB spec, but people built them anyway. A common usecase for "illegal" A-A cables i remember was connecting PCIe cards (especially GPUs and mining cards) externally to riser sockets.

[โ€“] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I have an external 3,5โ€œ HDD enclosure that needs a male to male USB 3.0 A cable to plug into a PC. Still wondering, why they didnโ€™t use Bโ€ฆ

[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's really odd. Why use a host connector when a client connector is intended for the purpose.

Did they entirely miss the purpose of USB?

[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Cost? A USB-A 3.0 connector is probably a few cents cheaper than a B 3.0 connector

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, it must be that.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I bought a breadboard power supply and the options to feed it power are a barrel jack and usb-a. Considering the size of the thing mini or micro would have made way more sense.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The ones I have go trough the onboard voltage regulator and you can use them to power USB-devices. I suppose they've skipped diodes and other protective components so it can feed back to the circuit, but I haven't tested that.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I have a similar caddy. Many years old now. The connection to the host computer is a USB-A female, so connecting it requires a male to male cable.

[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_On-The-Go

In 2001 the directionality became kind of moot. Especially if you want to do attach something with an on-the-go host

[โ€“] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

An OTG setup needs all 5 pins of the micro-B connector. USB A cannot be used for OTG. If a USB-A port can act as a client, that's not OTG, it's a botched implementation.