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Comment by rickcarlino | Hacker News Reader

Be sure to put those connectors through adequate stress testing. I’ve had several products that use a similar design (Garmin watch, Bluetooth headset) and I’ve been disappointed to find that the connector wears out with time.

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Founder here, thank you for this note we will build a jig to test this out and share results on our docs. One of the things we have done to reduce wear over time is that the spring contact is on the device and we expose a very small contact surface from the housing. Check this - https://ibb.co/xqm3z3W

I suspect the actual reason USB-C does so well is the redundancy.

With so many connectors, it seems like you could do 3 or 4x redundant connectors for something simple like I2C and power or maybe even USB2.0.

Seems like pogo pins are pretty top notch reliable by themselves though.

On Garmin watches the springy mechanical part is on the cable, not the watch. Have you observed the watch itself wearing out? I would hope it's designed such that the cable is sacrificial and the watch lasts. In the product here the springs appear to be on the device side, which seems to me like the bit that would be more likely to wear out. That's concerning, but there's more chance of being to able to replace it than in something tiny like a watch.

The Magsafe connector on Apple laptops has pogo pins on the cable, plus a magnet to hold them on. I've had machines of all 3 generations. They have mostly been reliable, controlled for the number of cycles. But I have seen the laptop get worn down, and the pins eventually became unreliable on old laptops.

I don't know how that holds up against USB or the previous weird barrel jack thing they used. Magsafe is far more visible than the others.

That’s a correct assessment of the situation, but the lifetime of the cables is not satisfactory with my expectations. I do eventually buy a new cable every six months, but I really just wish there was a USB-C port with a rubber plug in it.

Reminds me of the unrepairable, craptastic design of FitBits charging connectors that would fail just about the time the warranty expired and the tech support "solution" was to "buy a new one".

At least on Apple and similar with inductive charging designs, there's nothing to break. (Repairability of the rest of it, notwithstanding.)

Founder here, the reason to not put spring contacts on extensions is to make it easy for anyone to make extensions by just exposing solder contacts or hand soldering small discs. But we will evaluate more on the endurance part and take a call on this, we are still pre-production right now.

It's almost as if the connector itself should be a swappable part - every 100,000 cycles or so you get a new one.

who will connect the connectors?

Easy, just make a sacrificial daughterboard which connects onto the mainboard.

Are pogo pins the gold standard for data across the most (dis)connect cycles? Could any hardware engineer chime in?

Pogo pins should handle tons of connections yes. At work we used these for board testing through test points ("bed of nails") and i never heard of the pogo pins wearing out.

These were pretty long pogo pins though. They wouldn't fit in this thing.

And if flimsy parts and design-for-manufacturing rather than design-for-repair aren't done intentionally to increase sales through replacements and/or to optimize for minimal cost, then it's done through negligence.

Hear me out but... this could have been a high-speed serial interface instead, much less stressing. And a breakout board for when you want GPIO.

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