So USB-C. Its obviously the best connector and its possibly the nerdiest wish but im looking forward to the day that its on everything. Type c all the things please.
But how does it work if each end is plugged into the device in opposing orientations?
Does the USB host and device do some sort of handshake to understand the orientation?
In: Technology
[take a look at the pinout diagram carefully](https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/uploads/articles/Fig1m11292018.png)
Quite a few pins serve the same exact purpose as another pin placed so that it would be in the same spot if the connector was reversed. The rest of the pins are redundant in the sense that they would perform the same function but on a different pair of wires (which doesn’t matter too much).
It’s rotationally symmetric
[You can see the pinout for the USB C connector here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/07/USB_Type-C_Receptacle_Pinout.svg/1280px-USB_Type-C_Receptacle_Pinout.svg.png). If you flip the cable over the A pins become the Bs and the Bs become As but that’s okay because A2 and A3 are TX1+ and TX1- while B2 and B3 are TX2+ and TX2- so you just flip which data channel is connected to those pins, but the devices don’t care because they still have two fully functional data channels.
Similarly all of the ground pins will rotate to replace a ground and the VBUS replace a VBUS pin so you don’t get any bad shorting
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