I spent this weekend at HACK IOT, the West Coast's first IoT-specific hackathon, working on some really cool technology with my teammate Kaushal Saraf.

Inspiration

The really amazing thing about HACK IOT is the huge amount of resources they have available to the teams. From raspberry pis to routers to even a handful of 3D printers for team to use. When trying to use some of these resources however I ran into a major problem - all of these devices used USB 3.0 but my MacBook Pro only had USB C.

The effort to move to a single port in USB C has meant that a lot of devices are a little bit antiquated in terms of their IO interfaces. This means that for the 40 million usb 3.0 devices that are still sold each month, the only way for them to be used by people with only USB C is through the dreaded dongle.

What we Built

Now there’s a fundamental problem with dongles: no one has them when you need them. So in order to better address the huge transition from USB 3.0 to USB C my team built a solution that doesn’t require actual hardware to interface with a USB 3.0.

Essentially what our team built was a wireless usb stick using a raspberry pi zero . Now we can use any USB device like it was a wireless device without the need for dongles. In the process of making the device - I learned way more about USB and the differences between 1.0 2.0 and 3.0 than anyone should ever have to learn.

In order to hook this device to any USB only device, just plug it into the USB port. That’s all! The device we made automatically makes anything it is plugged into effectively wireless.

Real World Example

A really great example of this is the printer I use in college. Since its super old printer that only takes in a usb stick as an input almost no one can use it (more than half the people who use it have USB C on their computer). As a result there’s been a lot of talk around this printer, which works perfectly well, being replaced in the near future for no reason other than the fact that most people can’t use USB 3.0 to connect to the printer anymore.

The 5 dollar solution my team built this weekend effectively removes the friction point for users who want to see this printer replaced, and future proofs this device so its useful life isn’t cut short arbitrarily. I plugged in the prototype my team built into the printer’s USB 3.0 port today morning, let’s see what people think of my solution in practice and whether we can save the environment a little bit by not replacing this working printer.