Mostly have been on r/mk and am more of a forum lurker than avid poster. I’ve been busy cutting custom plates and cases for people in the community now for almost a year on a Glowforge Pro laser cutter at my work, and now one in my garage.
Aside from the lasers, I am leading R&D of the performance line of products at Plugable: our entry level mechanical keyboards, gaming mouse, mousepad, and more to come! I also am the senior engineer on the team developing our USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 products.
@meniscus There’s a lot wrong in that article. Primarily when it comes to Thunderbolt. Do you want me to call out the issues or do you want to take my word that it legitimately triggered me? Haha!
If you have the time, I would love to get your take on what’s right and wrong. I read a lot of articles about why the USB C standard is bad, why implementation is bad, etc
Do you know anything about bluetooth bandwidths and connections? Is it possible to send both a keyboard input and audio output through one bluetooth module? It’d be cool to have a bluetooth keyboard where you could plug headphones into an audiojack on the keyboard and piggyback onto the bluetooth connection. Would you have to send the audio connection separately?
USB-C is the physical properties of the plug, the shape of it. The de facto standard interface for USB-C is USB 3, other interface standards include thunderbolt and quick charge.
Back in the day Mini-DIN-4 was the name of a standard that was used as a video cable, apple desktop bus and also for power delivery.
Complaining that all not all USB-C ports and cables be used to charge, provide high power or output display information is like complaining that I can’t use my ADB II keyboard plugged into the svideo in of my VCR or TV. Or complaining that it breaks when I plug in my Mini-DIN-4 power adaptor to it.
Horses for courses.
Standardisation is great, and I’m sure that as technologies progress more functionality will be integrated into these ports as standard, like how USB-OTG was not included on many early smartphones, though the charging ports looked the same. As a further example the latest standard of quick charge is compliant with USB-C and USB Power Delivery whereas previous versions were not.
There’s a Google engineer who tests USB C cables on Amazon just to make sure they don’t damage your devices. That’s bizarre to me these even sell in the first place.
Hah! I have Benson on speed dial practically. We’ve worked together over the years several times.
Bad products exist because of poor understanding of the standard or because unfortunately a lot of the factories in China just don’t care about the standard.
Maybe I am misreading this, but does this Wikipedia summary of USB 3.2 imply that connecting a cable to a USB 3.2 device won’t work if it’s not the right orientation?
I would assume that it would just identify which pins were on which side and adapt. That would make far more sense, but I have no experience with these things
I still need pay you for the prototype cork samples - I guess we lost touch via e-mail.
Send me a PM if you want to square up or at least let me cover the supplies cost!
(I’ll also trade / mail you a 60% 3D printed case if you find that more useful than Paypal)
In the mean time I may have gotten my own Glowforge so if you want to share any laser tips I’ll follow your threads. I still have to figure out where to pipe the laser exhaust though…
Also, I plan on revisiting the cork project very soon myself, so hopefully I can figure out how to do the laser cutting well!
@montydrei & @Ninja99 - Yes, USB-C can intelligently role swap and handle flip if implemented properly. This should remain true for 3.1 Gen1, Gen2, and 3.2 as well as Thunderbolt 3.
@keyboardbelle HI!!! Yes, I totally got distracted with my day job and our emails dropped off. If you’re on Discord you should try to connect with me there and we can chat about lasers, etc.
so if you want to share any laser tips I’ll follow your threads. I still have to figure out where to pipe the laser exhaust though… 
