take your PC and put it in another room
it really is a surprisingly elegant solution with a lot of upsides noise and
temperature all of a sudden are non-factors you don't need to worry
about your system getting filled with all the dust you produce just by
existing and for bonus points you can throw everything in a rack just to flex
your mad it status however to get peripherals like your
mouse and your keyboard your webcam your thumb drives working well you're going
to need some way to bridge the USB Gap that now exists between your machine and
you now these icron docks over here these
things are fantastic but the thing that's not fantastic about them is the
price so what about all those cheaper
Solutions out there how do they compete for speed and distance
wow the manner they operate in and how well they function might actually
surprise you even if you're not surprised to hear this segue to our
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get 10 bonus entries even if the details are complicated the function of the icon
USB Raven 3124 is pretty easy to explain
under normal circumstances your USB port
has some conductors in it let's say four
or nine or in the case of USBC some more those connect to wires when you plug in
and transmit a signal over those wires to whatever your target device is
here we take those wires and we plug them into the back of one of these boxes
some encoding happens here it transmits
that encoded data over fiber optic or Cat6 a cable to a receiver which decodes
the data and then reconstructs it back to the original USB signal at least
we're pretty sure that's how it works since that would explain both the xilinx
fpgas that we found at the heart of both of these units as well as their
astronomical price tag since the only thing we think it would reasonably be
doing is handling the encoding and decoding that's associated with going
from USB to another type of data transmission
with fiber this system can do up to 200
meters or a hundred meters on copper which is significantly farther than the
standard range of three meters for USB 3.1 gen 1 or 5 meters for USB 2. but you
don't need to have an expensive fpga powered device in order to break those
limits take this Corning Optical USB cable for example these are available
lengths of up to 50 meters which last I checked is a lot more than three and
they need only a tiny electrical to Optical conversion chip on each side to
take that USB data and transmit it long distances over fiber however while they
definitely have some advantages over the icons like oh I don't know say for
example size they also have some
disadvantages like price yeah they're
not actually really that much of a better deal and on top of that they're
not easily serviceable in the field so the length you have is the length you
get and as it turns out USB 2 and USB 3
they are not the same thing you hook this USB 3 cable up to a USB 2 device
you are Plum out of luck I mean to its
credit at least the cable is a lot more durable so it's less likely to get
broken in your walls walls speaking of walls if your house
looks anything like this with Cat6 or even Cat5e cables buried in them and
you're okay with USB 2.0 speeds and a distance limit of 50 meters there are a
lot of very economical options for this
meet the esku USB extender easy cool it
doesn't matter the point is it's only 60 on Amazon which despite being the same
price as our upcoming stubby screwdriver on LTT Store it transmits USB over
copper but wait a minute if it's using
copper what makes it different than any standard USB cable why can't you just
make a USB cable longer well you see it's the same thing that
makes any active cable different it uses a hub to act as a repeater now typically
this would be a self-powered hub which the esku is but unpowered will actually
do just fine here so long as it does what every other unpowered Hub seems to
do and it lies to the host system about its unpowered nature
the script says this is the part where we could try to build it ourselves
what oh
oh is this thing really that simple
it's just pin to pin oh no no so you take that you take this
and you take a hub and theoretically this should work
really however it doesn't it didn't quite function but
it could definitely see that there was a USB device being plugged in 50 feet away
after some Shenanigans maybe the editor will show you on our security cameras we
have got this working which is great because this is a pretty cool demo what
you're looking at here is a little board that has a USB port on it some commodity
Electronics wiring and they are hooked up to a keystone jack the reason this is
important is because I'm going to show you guys how we can make this for
ourselves all we've got to do is take a
USB a to a cable plug that into our computer
plug that into our USB port
okay then we take any cable right
because copper is copper in it
go like this plug another standard USB
cable into the other side and then oh connect it to a powered Hub and
theoretically all we have to do is plug in some USB device and
oh it works it's alive which raises some
questions if all we need is a cheap powered Hub
and a couple of like keystones
why exactly is anybody spending sixty dollars on this
you actually don't know do you is there a good is there isn't it I guess no I
really have no idea especially when there's Alternatives we'll get into that
in a minute I guess going off script here how far can we go
though what is this one I said this was 35 feet right 10 meters that is well
past what even USB 2 can do
here we go are we going to get mouse
oh hey yeah we got something we got something
we got an error it's too far both from a signaling and
from a power perspective there's just a limit to how far you can push these
things that is where these come in or maybe something like it but less
expensive what is it with Tanner and Linus USB experiments lately I don't get
it involved I do plan to talk about these in a
moment but first let's actually validate that the ease coup does perform better
than our DIY solution here's our 10 meter cable back
all right here's some power to our hub
is ease coup better than Linus oh wow
yep already worked better everything worked perfectly but does it work as
advertised can we go farther than 10 meters what's the biggest cable you got
oh cool it's that's two cables there's three cables oh God I just kept adding
cables on until it stopped working okay well how long is this one uh this is 50
meters why don't we try within spec first all right this reminds me of some
of the old like Wi-Fi range test videos we did in the NCIX parking lot except
USB range and there's no parking lot although
I think we could reach the parking lot with this if we really wanted to let's
see if it works wow okay all right okay okay
this is worth contextualizing let's talk about just how far 50 meters is well we
gotta go
we're going this way 60 bucks hey
kind of seems like a value
should we see if we can make it to Creator Warehouse you said you had more
cables attached to this did it still work yes good gravy none of us are still
back at the studio to uh
well the screen cap is running and if the mouse is moving right now then
imagine that we're doing like a dude perfect yeah yeah come on because you celebrate
why don't we get on a call why don't you run in there and then we'll uh call and
then I'll be right back because I need more cable uh Andrew you wait here sure
okay is it working
yeah no oh no no just kidding it's not plugged
in you saw something setting up a device
fire surge oh yeah move it down to the start menu
where it is on sensible computers you're a top ped bar guy explained
oh if I was wearing a high Vis vest or
something this would be fine here we go we're gonna try to make it all the way
to Creator Warehouse over 200 feet
we're testing again is the mouse plugged in
yes I'm gaming am I clicking on anything is
this useful yeah you just
selecting a bunch of things uh I am flipping impressed and there is no
shortage of devices just like this that can be had for around this cost but as I
alluded to before if all you need is a
keyboard and mouse running you don't even necessarily need USB 2 so we can go
down even more for price let's show you what we've got next this
little Monoprice number which came recommended by Wendell does have some
disadvantages it only has a single female port on this side for example and
I already told you guys it's dog slow but it requires no power on either side
also can run up to 50 meters Tanner can
you confirm I can confirm
and it costs just 25
actually no 25 where the heck were you
shopping for this I'm on monoprice's website and it is twelve dollars
yeah comes in a two pack well never mind
you won't be fast charging your phone with one of these anytime soon but given
the lengths that they can run at while being able to use category network
cables that are so ubiquitous they practically grow on trees the
possibilities are practically endless for these things the networking cables
in your wall truly are a wonderful thing and while the real world applications of
having your mouse 50 meters away from your computer might be fairly limited
twisted pair is really just that Twisted
pairs of copper cables and they don't care what's running through them whether
it's USB HDMI network audio in fact in
our new building that we're building out we're just putting RJ45 terminations
everywhere the speakers are we're not sure if we're going to use IP speakers
or regular speakers but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter it's
just copper you can actually even get pre-made Ethernet to all kinds of
different terminations like XLR or RCA
and as long as you follow the same pin out uh I mean it's not here anymore but
you guys saw it you can even mix and match to build your own cables being
copper however there are some downsides metal cables are much more susceptible
to electromagnetic interference for example now in most homes and small
businesses that's not going to be a huge issue but for some it might be distance
as we've already discussed is also a
factor depending on the strength of your transceivers Optical can go much farther
than what is practical with copper cabling and as I discussed before if you
need performance you're going to need to go for something
a little more exotic for everyone else though a simple cheap solution from
Monoprice Prime cables or even as cool yep even you should work
just fine and if neither of those suit your fancy and in fact you don't even
care about extending your cables at all maybe you'd prefer this message from our
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nordsecurity.com Linus or click the link in the video description if you guys if
you guys enjoyed this video you know what I'm doing it I'm throwing to the
range test on the parrot AR drone in the
NCIX parking lot it's not on our Channel I'm not going to get any AD Revenue but
it's definitely got a similar vibe