I was thinking that it would be cool if there was a retractable USB cable expansion card. The way I was thinking of making it is that there is a gear with a little flat part on top you turn left or right to rotate the cable around it, moving the end in or out. What do you think of this idea?
0 voters
Would this just be a place to store a USB cable? Would it be connected to the laptop and you could pull it out to use it, or would you have to remove the expansion card to wind/unwind the cable? Is the idea to have a sort of built-in, retractable charging cable, or would this be a cable you plugged other devices into? Just curious what this USB cable would specifically be used for.
Modern, high-speed USB cables have a lot of conductors and a lot of shielding, so I don’t know that you’d get much length coiled up in the space of an expansion slot, especially when you consider the space taken up by even a small connector, like a USB-C or Micro-USB. I think the only thing you’d get much length on are those flat cables that you sometimes see for charging phones and other low-power devices. Even then, I can’t imagine you’d get more than 6-8" of that flat cable in one of the expansion card slots.
Nice idea, put look at the results of the poll. Not enough interest to make it worthwhile to manufacture the product.
I have seen many, and bought a coupla devices, (mices i think) that had a cord that ‘could’ retract. ‘could’ but after some use they ‘wont’. they jam, and you have a device that wont work. better to use the available usb-a and usb-c expansion ports and plug a cable into it. if the expansion port or the cable fails you replace it. both are moderate in cost. my 2 cents.
regards…
dNorm