usb-c cable colour codes

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Organization: Archive Team

Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.

History is littered with hundreds of conflicts over the future of a community, group, location or business that were "resolved" when one of the parties stepped ahead and destroyed what was there. With the original point of contention destroyed, the debates would fall to the wayside. Archive Team believes that by duplicated condemned data, the conversation and debate can continue, as well as the richness and insight gained by keeping the materials. Our projects have ranged in size from a single volunteer downloading the data to a small-but-critical site, to over 100 volunteers stepping forward to acquire terabytes of user-created data to save for future generations.

The main site for Archive Team is at archiveteam.org and contains up to the date information on various projects, manifestos, plans and walkthroughs.

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Our collection has grown to the point of having sub-collections for the type of data we acquire. If you are seeking to browse the contents of these collections, the Wayback Machine is the best first stop. Otherwise, you are free to dig into the stacks to see what you may find.

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There is a dashboard running for the archivebot process at http://www.archivebot.com.

ArchiveBot's source code can be found at https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/ArchiveBot.

TIMESTAMPS

USB-C Cable Colour Codes (alpha)

USB-C was supposed to be the answer to the chaos that is charge and data cable compatibility. And to an extent it was. It unified ports and reduced the amount of cables and chargers I need to travel with. The cables themselves, however, turned out to be a mess. They come in many varieties with obtuse names, confusing markers, and unclear compatibility rules. Yet they all look exactly the same.

Here is a colour coding scheme for USB-C to USB-C cables to distinguish them by their use.

There are currently 8 types of USB-C cables defined. Benson Leung's post lists them and explains how they relate to power and data transfer rates. Drawing from that we can observe that cables differ in two dimensions. The first is the kind of data signalling a cable supports, and the second is the amount of current it can carry. Based on this we can give data signalling colours.

Putting them together we get the full matrix of the 8 possible USB-C to USB-C cable types today.

	USB 2.0	USB 3.2 Gen 1	USB 3.2 Gen 2	Thunderbolt 3
3A	CC2-3	CC3G1-3	CC3G2-3	CC3G3-3
5A	CC2-5	CC3G1-5	CC3G2-5	CC3G3-5

Different cables that look identical is not a new problem, and distinguishing them by colour is not a new idea. Crossover ethernet cables look exactly like straight through ones, but I recall they tended to be green. Some have even published standards for ethernet cable colours.

It did not take long before I started relying on the colour to not mix my cables up. Maybe the industry can one day start putting clearer markings for cable types. Or any markings at all. Looking at you, Apple.

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