The spurious cable not only fried his Chromebook Pixel laptop but also two USB PD (power delivery) analysers. Leung says that as soon as he plugged in the cable and turned it on, it completely fried the Vbus line on the Twinkie USB PD analyser. “This is permanent damage. I tried resetting the Twinkie analyzer and having the firmware reflashed, but it continues to exhibit this failure,” Leung wrote. Not only did the cable kill the analyser, though, but it also fried both USB Type-C ports on Leung’s Chromebook Pixel: “Neither would charge or act as a host when I plugged in a USB device such as an ethernet adapter.” Leung did some detective work and found that the dodgy cable had destroyed his Chromebook’s embedded controller, a chip that manages tasks such as keyboard initialisation, USB charging, and reading temperature sensors. Curious at the incident, Leung decided to inspect the dodgy cable. Leung analysed the cable with a breakout board and a multimeter. What he found was really quite shocking: “it appears that they completely miswired the cable. The GND pin on the Type-A plug is tied to the Vbus pins on the Type-C plug. The Vbus pin on the Type-A plug is tied to GND on the Type-C plug.” Heung decided to warn other buyers of the product and made a post on Google+ Ars’ Sebastian Anthony dug out this paragraph from the product description page of Surjtech.
