The Ware for March 2026 is below:
This ware malfunctioned, so I took it apart to see what’s going on and now it’s this month’s Name that Ware. As it would be far too easy to guess if I showed the whole circuit board, this is just a portion of the whole ware. I suspect the nature of the ware will be easy to figure out, but would be impressed if anyone can determine the exact make & model, since these are likely OEM’d by a handful of factories and the same core design is shared among a wide family of devices.
As a mostly unrelated side-rant, one side effect of the transition to USB-C that I’ve noticed is that power ratings just aren’t what they used to be. If a power supply said 100 watts on the label, it used to mean 100 watts continuous over a full consumer temperature range. Now, somehow, it seems to have become normalized that it’s 100 watts “briefly”, and maybe two thirds of that continuously on a good day. This is a problem if you use your laptop to do board layout (stressing the discrete GPU) while compiling large Rust programs in the background (stressing the CPU) for hours at a time, while also trying to charge your battery after a long flight. Then again, a 90% efficient regulator at 100 watts is dissipating roughly 10 watts of heat – as much as a small soldering iron – so maybe I shouldn’t be so shocked by this outcome.
I’d guess some sort of laptop docking station. Side rant made me think USB-C power supply but the ICs were the big hint.
The IC in the center is marked as VL817, a USB 3.1 Gen1 4-port hub controller. The one on the right is AG9411, which is a USB-C to HDMI converter.
Forgot to mention, AG9411 is described as “DisplayPort 1.4 over USB-C to HDMI 2.0 converter with PD 3.0”. The product page mentions that it supports one USB Type-C plug and one USB Type-C receptacle. I believe it’s directly connected to the laptops USB-C port and creates a mixed USB3 + dual lane DP connection. Then it passes the USB3 connection to the USB hub IC. I highly suspect this is the way it’s handled as there is a connector pinout on the right hand side. I think this is where the USB cable of the docking port is soldered. Its labels match with the pins used for DP alt mode:
* B5: Vconn
* A5: CC
* A6: D+
* A7: D-
* B8: Sideband use 2
* A8: Sideband use 1
* A4: Vbuc
Also there seems to be a connector sitting on the other side of AG9411. The shield pins look different compared to the connector on the other side of VL817, or the one of the left of it. Maybe the connector on the other side of the AG9411 is the power input and the others are the USB A ports.
Consumer manufacturers have definitely taken the Muntzing of their equipment to an extreme the last couple of decades…
this is a HDMI 2.0 + USB-A dongle just like what tayken explained earlier.
What I find this interesting is that I suspect this is an Anker brand but china Aigo OEM design board that go for the lower cost market.
The reason:
RoHS brand design (export model)
ENIG solder pad
Anker style USB-C test pad
But it have the green soldermask and way more label that the typical high end Anker dongle which usually feature a black PCB board and smaller silkscreen font.
Also the lack of TVS diode and dirty solder oil mark suggest this is a not a super high quantity assembled product but the tracing of the chip and the ENIG solder pad super similar to Anker design.
I am very confuse about the origin of this board. Maybe this is what we get from Anker nowadays since all the teardown i saw for anker dongle is not that latest.
The port layout is identical to an Anker 6-in-1 USB-C Hub (https://www.chargerlab.com/teardown-of-anker-6-in-1-usb-c-hub-a8365/), but the chip layout is slightly different and the solder mask is green instead of black like you said. Probably a Chinese knock-off.
I did not have much luck finding OEM branded ones on AliExpress with the same port layout. The closest I found was a UGREEN 7-in-1 adapter (https://us.ugreen.com/products/7-in-1-multiport-adapter-with-4k-60hz), but that seems to be a bit wider than the Anker adapter.
I saw the same things previously mentioned here, from right-to-left the through-hole pins look like an HDMI connector, a USB-A connector, a USB-C connector, and then a USB-A connector, and that all matches the functions of the visible IC’s. The USB-C connector and HDMI connector are positioned on one side of the device, and the USB-A connectors are most likely on the other side.
I found a UGreen “6-in-1” adapter (https://us.ugreen.com/products/15598) that’s very similar to your finding. It seems to only differ in that on yours one of the USB-A ports has been replaced by a pair of SD card readers.
Things that maybe don’t perfectly match:
– Looking at the VL817 pinout, I don’t see vias breaking out DFP3 or DFP4, so I’m not sure how they would get the other USB port or Ethernet. Maybe the vias are just under the chip.
– The 6-in-1 adapter I found only advertises HDMI 4k@30Hz. The AG9411 can do 4k@60Hz. The 7-in-1 adapter claims 4k@60Hz, so it’s probably a better guess.
I also found another mystery brand with a similar design (https://www.benfei.com/products/benfei-6-in-1-usb-c-hub-with-hdmi4k-60hz-2-usb-a-1-usb-c-data-100w-charge-gigabit-ethernet-silicone-tangle-free-cable-compatible-with-macbook-pro-air-ipad-pro-imac-iphone-15-pro-pro-max). I like this one more, since it seems suitably cheap and the enclosure has rounded edges. The corners of the PCBA visible in the image look like they’ve been drilled out. That could just be a detail of how it was panelized, but it could also be a cheap way to get a V-cut PCBA to fit an enclosure with rounded edges.
I’m sure whatever USB config is loaded on that nice little SPI Flash would tell us :)
it feels like a random chinese ali express usb-c multiport adapter (docking station), the pcb model is prob EMA537-2F
It’s those big forked contacts that are intriguing me. Even asked Claude about it: it had some thoughts I won’t repeat here to avoid spoiling the water.
One thing I (think I’ve) identified is the unpopulated pads / land pattern bottom left – was trying to work out what socket would have 12 pads in two rows like that: but the top row does have a clear set of 4 pads that feel USB-A-ish… could it be a USB-A socket for USB 3? They have that extra set of contacts deep inside the socket, and the lower row has two clear sets of diff pairs going on if you look at the traces. Hmm.
My electronics knowledge is so patchy that these posts and the comments end up being utterly fascinating. Thanks all :)
Those pads are probably not unpopulated, but rather for pins that are shorter than the thickness of the PCB. They are for the bottom row of pins in a USB-C socket like this one: https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C709038.html It also have SMD pads on the other side of the PCB for the top row of pins in the socket. For the full 24-pin USB-C sockets you usually need something with both SMD pads and through-hole pins this or edge connectors with SMD pads on both sides of the PCB to make them easy to route.
You are correct that the set of 4 pads is more or less the USB-2.0 part of the bottom row of pins (except GND replaced by a symmetric VBUS pin in the socket). The main reason for them being grouped like that is probably to make room for the diff pairs to the high-speed interconnects. BTW, most USB-A 3.0 sockets actually have their high-speed interconnects on the top row for easier diff pair routing, and the USB 2.0 pins on the bottom one.
As someone who worked with audio in the pre-CD 70s and 80s, the term “watts” was very flexible indeed. It could mean anything from continuous, both channels driven, to square waves generated in the last dying millisecond of the output stage.
I have one cheap USB C supply that is quite impressive. It will power a Macbook if nothing is plugged in, but if a 5 volt thing is plugged in to another one of the 4 outputs, it will deliver 5 volts to all outputs.