The instructions said, “Use ONLY the cable that came with the product.”
I said, “Well then make it distinctive and not look like every other USB cable in my cable box!”
I don’t know whether I believe my Manta Sleep Mask needs that exact USB cable to charge, but I do know that my Epson scanner has real troubles with most generic cables. In the latter case, there are large noise suppression “blobs” on the cable that make it obvious. In the former case, it looks like any other USB-A to USB-C cable.
I have some other products with these types of admonitions, plus there are some cables that only work to charge, and others that transfer data faster or slower. So I decided I needed to find a solution to identifying the right cables.
I have a Brother label printer, so I wondered if there was something it could do to create a kind of “flag”. I’ve seen commercial cablers use such things and some commercial products come with them attached — hair dryers usually have one telling you not to use them in the bath. I could find no such solution.
Somewhere in my searching, I came across the idea of cable ties with a rectangular tag on the end. There were a few products on Amazon, but I settled on the “NICE PURCHASE 250pcs 6 inch Wire Zip Ties Self-Locking Plastic Nylon Cable Ties Multicolor Network Wire Plastic Straps Label Mark Tag”. They are about USD$14.
If you didn’t get the idea from the Amazon product name, these are just like regular plastic zip ties, but on the end with the hole, there is a flat panel, about 25 mm by 15 mm. The pack comes with 256 stick on labels you can write on, or you can write directly on the tags with permanent marker. I chose to use my label printer because my handwriting is terrible.
The colours are red, green, blue, yellow, orange, black, and the usual translucent “white”. That’s 7 different colours, and they seem to be in roughly equal numbers.
The ties are long enough to go around something of 30 mm diameter so they’ll certainly do to label all of your household cables! You can even bunch and label multiple cables in one go if desired.