I’d like to know what happens.
In: Technology
USB ports provide both power and data wires. Power only provides 5 volts, but it’s workable.
The USB killer has a voltage converter that converts 5 volts to something WAY higher… like a few hundred volts. It pulls the 5 volts from the port to charge up its power storage… and when it reaches that high voltage, it sends that power down the data wires. Repeat as long as it keeps getting power.
The data wires are meant to use 0 to ~3.3 volts for the 0 and 1 binary signals, and will go right into a small chip. It is not meant to withstand hundreds of volts and will quickly, if not instantly, kill it. You now have a completely dead chip on the circuit board of your… whatever it is. PC, laptop, television…. At a minimum, that USB port doesn’t work any more.
Some systems provide a single chip that can do USB, CPU, some RAM and storage. Maybe more, maybe less… They’re called a System On A Chip. It’s very nice for circuit board manufacturers to have all the basics of a computer in one chip on the board, but it means a USB killer might destroy them all at once. Now the thing doesn’t work at all.
And these are not parts easily swapped out.
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