Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff

Evolution of usb connector?

<< < (9/18) > >>

fsr:
I remember when USB was appearing on different motherboards, and you looked at the computer stores and there were like no devices to plug there! Mostly mouses, and that's it. Well, at least that's what happened here. A bunch of years ago.

And yeah, the rectangular connector of USB is ridiculous, as it's very hard to see in what orientation must the connector go, something that is made still worse, as many connectors are in the back of the PC, and you cannot really look at them very well most of the time.

Currently, another problem is that many connectors have similar dimensions. I think that you can probably force a USB A into the wrong socket.

james_s:
That wasn't really an issue when USB was new though, well the orientation was always trickier than it ought to be although really no worse than the mini-DIN used for keyboards and mice at the time. When USB was a new thing, it was far smaller and a completely different shape from all the other connectors used on computers. It was very distinctive and there was no confusing it.

Some of the earliest things I remember using it for besides mice were scanners and printers where it replaced the gigantic Centronics-50 SCSI connector and slightly smaller parallel printer cables.

https://goo.gl/images/ShoLVu

https://goo.gl/images/kGHUXa

At the time it was marvelously tiny, not only the connector but the cable too. The thickest USB cables are less than half the diameter of the thinnest printer and SCSI cables I can recall seeing. And you could connect them to a hub too! It may be hard for younger people to comprehend just what a change it was. Suddenly we went from a bunch of different standards using similar looking but incompatible big bulky connectors and thick cables to one slender cable with a single type of tiny connector for almost everything. Then with things like SCSI you had to set a unique ID on each device, fuss around with terminators and make sacrifices to the computer gods in hopes that it would all actually work.

It reminds me of the first time I saw a 2.5" hard drive, it was so small I could hardly believe it held 20MB. It never occurred to me at the time that hard drives could be made yet smaller, and I'd never have believed it possible to fit tends of GB onto a fingernail sized micro SD card as we can today.

tooki:

--- Quote from: LapTop006 on December 17, 2018, 05:44:57 am ---
--- Quote from: james_s on December 17, 2018, 04:33:41 am ---IIRC the original USB connectors were based on the connector used for linking the Nintendo Game Boy handheld systems, which had proven it to be a robust design even in the hands of clumsy or rambunctious kids.

--- End quote ---

The 6-pin FireWire 400 cable is more like the old gameboy connector.



--- End quote ---
Yep. It is FireWire 400, not USB, that was directly inspired by the GameBoy connector. (I don’t think Nintendo ever got enough credit for pioneering that type of pinless connector. Before it, only large plugs like Centronics used anything like that arrangement, where it’s basically a plastic card-edge connector instead of actual pins.)

Ultimately, if we were going to invent the USB connector today, we’d do all sorts of things differently: it’d be smaller, reversible, have rounded leading edges to go in more easily, and be designed to stand up to the rough handling in mobile devices.

Oh wait, we just did that, it’s called USB-C. (And indeed it’s like a reversible, metal-sheathed mini version of the GameBoy connector.)

tooki:

--- Quote from: coppercone2 on December 18, 2018, 02:01:57 am ---i wanna know the engineering process at this point I don't care the politics behind the spec

--- End quote ---
What you casually dismiss as “politics” ARE the engineering requirements that drove the spec!

coppercone2:
I should focus down to the metallurgical interface properties and the dielectric durability or whatever else may effect it. Was some kind of novel thing discovered from the first USB connector between the current connector. From a manufacturing process prospective.

All the stuff in this thread is pretty hard but it seems like you don't need to know anything special if you already know about the first USB connector design other then to work out the new mechanics from a structural engineering view point.

I don't know how to put this. is there an interesting secret sauce ? process step? materials choice? finishing steps? extra quality checks? more advanced adhesives? something (physics) weird that came up?

example: with cables something I considered to qualify for the above criterion is the kevlar fiber reinforced USB cables that are for sale now. They use a special weave method (if you trust the package and its too expensive for me to destroy) to make it more durable. IMO thats a innovation rather then a refinement (but its extremely well hidden unless you advertise it). I don't know if it was just borrowed from another industry or came out because of the portable electronics revolution but its pretty cool. Or magnetic connectors, a whole new fairly complicated mechanical design aspect was introduced to connector manufacturing with the magnetic mate. Or those little crimps (molex I think) that crimp on both the wire and insulation with separate wings.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page

There was an error while thanking
Thanking...
Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod