[Noisebridge-discuss] Looking to pay someone to build a simple device

[Henner Zeller]

On Sat, 22 Dec 2018 at 02:43, Matthew Kleinsmith <mwksmith at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hey, I'm looking to pay someone $70 plus money for parts to build a simple USB splitter. Is anyone in the Bay Area interested?
>
> I need it to take a USB signal and then send it to two devices at the same time, and ideally without adding much of a delay. This means one end would be USB female and two ends would be USB male.

If you want to send data from the computer to two devices, wouldn't
you need two female and one male connect ?

What do you want to achieve ? The  USB standard is a bidirectional bus
protocol, so if you intend to send/receive data you can do that only
from one connection, and then have maybe something listening passively
on the other one what is going on. But you can't fundamentally, say,
plug in a camera and plug it into two computers and have the image
show up on both; or vice versa: have multiple devices receive the same
data from one computer. As the protocol is not simply 'sending stuff',
but it is a whole back and forth protocol. If you had two devices
connected just with some crossover cabling, nothing would work.

So the closest to plugging in two devices is to actually use a hub.
There is no such thing as an 'Y-cable' that also splits data; you can
only use that with power.

> When I searched for this device all I found were Y-cables where one line was unfortunately power only.

Exactly, and that is the only thing that would work.

-h