Electronic – convert usb-male device to usb-female pluggable device

solderingusbusb deviceusb-c

I have an external audio card, it's small and it has usb-a male to plug it anywhere, well anywhere you have usb-female of course 🙂
I've been using it on the few mobile phones I have. (some are on micro-usb, some are on usb-c. some are on apple lighting)

Now the way I get it to work is always using that phone adapter cable that is pluggable to mobile device and has ucb-a female adapter on the other side. I have 3 of them.. one for apple, one for usb-c, and one for micro-usb.

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I tend to lose them around the house all the time so I thought.. What if I resolder the usb-male on the card to USB-female so I can always plug it with either of the charging/data cables, which I always seem to have laying around. Basically I'd love to convert that usb-male to something more like that..
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I tried a few usb2usb (both female ends) adapters but they don't seem to work. I tried to resolder the usb jack to the female and followed the order all well and even tried it reverse but neither of the phones seem to detect the device this way.

Does anyone know what is missing?

I'm thinking my next try would be to resolder that usb-male to usb-c female, maybe this way it will work but other than that I'm clueless

Thanks in advance!!

Best Answer

This is not possible for micro B or type C. Lightning is not as well documented but likely similar. USB-C to C cables will enable this sort of thing by design and include a dedicated CC wire in the cable partly for this reason but existing USB-A terminated cables cannot do what you want and electrically identify themselves as connecting to an upstream port.

For USB micro B The connector has a fifth pin (sense) that electrically identifies what role the connected device should assume. Normal cables leave this floating and various resistances to ground mean different things (shorted==USB upstream,100K=USB upstream w/ external 5V). Obviously this isn't accessible at the USB A end of the cable.

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USB C does something similar with the CC pins which are again handled by the USB-C connector on the end of the cable for A to C cables. These identify themselves electrically as connecting to an upstream device and this cannot be overridden at the USB A end.

Lightning is Apple's special proprietary snowflake and I have no idea but here too it almost certainly won't work.

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