USB cables can be used to:transfer data, at different ratespower or charge gadgets, phones, and even laptopsconnect to headphones and displays… and everything else you could imagine which uses wires But somehow I never manage to find the right one for the current task, also because sometimes they can’t even be visually distinguished. And when some device doesn’t work right, how long did you spend debugging everything else before suspecting the cable? In this talk we will see how USB cables work and how to distinguish them to prevent this waste of time. This becomes even more important with USB-C, which just makes things more complicated.