Days upon days I've spent on making this shit. Now the PC doesn't recognize it as a fucking hub, and instead it's just a glorified LED with some audio connectors next to it. What a fantastic waste of time 😑

What is it supposed to do? Looks cool.

tag me once you tell what this was supposed to be

@PrivateGER It's supposed to be a breakout for 2 ports in my PC.. the left is for 3.5mm which is placed on the left side on my PC and I'd like to have it closer to me on my desk instead.. wires dangling around is one thing, but having them all over the desk is a pain in the ass. This is supposed to solve that. As for the hub, Acer made this really poor design choice of placing a USB 2.0 port at the bottom, but with such a deep indentation that none of my plugs fit into it. So I hoped that I could make my own hub and wires to accommodate for that :/
Maybe tomorrow I'll look whether it's a problem in the hub or the micro USB adapter.. the latter I may be able to remove and replace with plain wires that go directly to the USB port in the PC. If it's the controller however, I customized it to such an extent that I don't really feel like doing it again.. and the ports are superglued in the base.

@JoshBent ^ there you go :)

@Condor it has two 3.5mm jacks though? one is for microphone input I assume? since it doesn't look like an led in metal casing, also how would you do the receiver, implementing a driver yourself to host audio and hub functions over usb or did the hub come with that all and you just disassembled it?

@JoshBent The audio jacks are just a breakout. I'd plug the one end into my PC's headphone jack using a wire I've made earlier, and make another one to plug into my headphones. So it's essentially just an extension of the headphone jack port in my PC. Also the casing is MDF, far easier to work with than metals like aluminium.. kinda sucks that I don't have all the proper woodworking tools though, so I had to make the holes for the USB ports with a drill and shape them with a knife.. which is a fuckload of work >_<

@Condor ahh gotcha, didn't think of it being a passthrough for a male/male cable similar to volume knobs, also now that I write it, I remember you were doing a cable just like that, might've helped to remember that too 😁

I hope you get it to work. Electronics can be a real pain, which is why I leave all that to my brother 🙂

If it also has audio as well then it probably won't reconize as a hub without additional drivers.

@Schroedinbug the audio and USB parts are 2 separate circuits 🙂 the hub is just a modified hub, whereas the audio F-F breakout is.. well just a couple of wires connecting the 2 sockets really.

Nice work - I couldn't muster the motivation to shape a connector outlet with only a knife 😨 - even if it isn't working. :)
Do you have a possibility to check whether the data signals make it to the board?

I was going to comment 'mention @Condor, he's good with this stuff!!

😅

When I saw the picture I knew it was you! I love that we have our own devrant hw-guy :)

@nin0x03 Thanks! And yeah it takes a lot of time to get them right.. probably getting a couple of small chisels wouldn't be a bad idea. I have probed the data lines with my multimeter (oscilloscope probably would be too slow to catch the data signals and I don't understand USB protocol very well anyway) but I'm getting 3.3-ish V on D+ and 65mV on D-. I've read somewhere that D- should be 200mV in this case. Perhaps that's got to do with it? At such a low voltage it may as well be charges leaking away or something like that.

Hubby is not amused!

@Kinky-Code I wondered when someone would notice, haha. It's a dirty hack that I did in the end to mitigate the port getting pulled out when I inserted the USB cable. Actually that's why the case top is so glossy.. I had it superglued in place and when the socket got pushed out into the board and detached from the enclosure, I had to open it up again and end up being very pissed about it. So I just jammed some MDF underneath there and ran some screws in it. Perhaps I'll make a more permanent solution for it later.

@Condor Form follows function is always a good principle ^^
Btw. MDF is awesome. It's cheap and good to process compared to pure wood or aluminium.

Edit: If you have spare goggly-eyes, use them! xD

hey man, laptop or real pc ? if its a real pc, you can find 4 pin usb connectors on the mainboard, extend them, and use these as a connection to your box, usb driver is the chipset on the mainboard so that cant be the problem

@BadCompany It's an AIO, so kind of in-between. I can access the motherboard, desolder that USB connector and replace it with some wires coming out of the bottom, but I'd like to avoid that. It's pretty much what I've done with this hub as well - the stock USB connectors came out on the side of the controller - but while a fucked up €1 controller is no big deal (I mean it's pretty much just lost man hours but the board can be easily replaced), a €600 motherboard is.. so I don't feel comfortable soldering on that yet. Hence why I'd prefer going with just jamming a male USB connector from my component box in there without its enclosure, and breakout the wires from that instead. Probably that won't justify the existence of that micro USB connector on my hub though, as I can't solder directly on such plugs yet. So probably that'll be removed soon and be replaced with just wires going from A to B.

oh ic, most of the time, soldering isnt nececary, they are standard 4-pin heads. ps: usb cables have a short max length and if there's a little of a loose connection voltage can drop too low for data, usually the case if it still gets powered but not accesed by software. good luck

@BadCompany Ah yes, USB wires often have high gauge wires, hence why the spec is so stringent. To deal with resistance losses, I could just lower the wire gauge to something like 28AWG (which should be able to carry signals over a few meters without too many losses) or even 18AWG wires which I normally use for power connections (since it can carry up to 10A). Eh, the spec can say whatever it wants to. If I can still get a decent voltage from A to B, I might just as well discard it. That stuff is only there for the cheapie manufacturers to determine how much they can skim on copper anyway.