I once saw someone find a seemingly lost thumb drive on a table and look around, then pick it up and pocket it. A few minutes later there was a lot of commotion in the other room about twenty feet away. The guy had plugged it into a laptop, which was now billowing grey smoke out of the side vent port. I surmised it was a USB killer.
Older laptops sometimes had very poor USB implementations that could die if they were shorted out, especially if the short was between 5V and the data pins (which are 3.3V maximum).
I think the spec says that all pins should be 5V tolerant and the supply limited to 500mA, but of course back in the USB 2.0 era a lot of crappy hardware didn't bother. I've seen machines that had no current limit on the 5V line at all, so a short would dump a few amps into the controller chip.
I judge a religion as being good or bad based on whether its adherents
become better people as a result of practicing it.
- Joe Mullally, computer salesman
USB Killer (Score:3)
Re:USB Killer (Score:4, Interesting)
Older laptops sometimes had very poor USB implementations that could die if they were shorted out, especially if the short was between 5V and the data pins (which are 3.3V maximum).
I think the spec says that all pins should be 5V tolerant and the supply limited to 500mA, but of course back in the USB 2.0 era a lot of crappy hardware didn't bother. I've seen machines that had no current limit on the 5V line at all, so a short would dump a few amps into the controller chip.