What the service does
Whichcable narrows a cable to a family by the shape of its ends, and then tells you where to look on it to tell more — the mark impressed beside the contacts, the line of print running along the jacket, and how thick and how stiff the cable is in the hand. For each of those it tells you what its absence would rule out.
The narrowing itself happens in your browser, from a fixed table of shapes. Where an automated model is involved at all, it is given exactly one job: sort a written description of two ends into one of those shape groups. It is never asked, and is not able, to make a claim about a cable.
Some things simply cannot be told by looking
A cable with no printed marking cannot have its capability determined from its appearance. Not by you, not by an expert, and not by this service.
This is listed explicitly on every reading rather than glossed over — and it is included on the free plan, because putting it behind a paywall would be selling silence. Plugging in is not the same as working. A cable that goes into the socket has told you that it fits, and nothing else at all.
Beyond that, three things are never knowable, however carefully you look and whatever is printed on the cable:
- What is actually inside this cable — how many wires run the whole way, and how they are joined.
- What this cable has been through: pulled by the lead, shut in a drawer, bent hard against a desk edge.
- The equipment you mean to plug it into, and what that equipment expects.
No specification or compatibility claim, of any kind
The service gives no figure for power, current, voltage, speed, resolution or refresh. It does not say whether a cable will drive any particular piece of equipment. It mentions no brand and no model, and it holds no data on cable models — there is no product database behind this and there is not going to be one.
The reason is not caution. It is that this kind of information varies by batch and by maker, so writing a number down here would be inventing one. What a cable can actually do is decided by how it was made, not by its shape. If it is marked, the marking is the best thing you have. If it is not, treat it as unknown.
What the service does describe, within a family, is the dimensions along which cables in that family differ — whether one carries data as well as power, whether it can carry a picture, how much it was built to carry — never a value on any of those dimensions.
No judgement about whether a cable is safe to use
If it looks damaged, if the outer covering is split or deformed, if a connector is loose, or if it gets warm in use — do not use it. That is not a judgement about this particular cable; it is the only sensible default.
The service never says that a cable is safe, and never says that a cable is unsafe. It does not assess condition. The wording above is issued with every reading without exception, and it is never obscured by a watermark or hidden behind a plan.
Anything to do with mains power, or with cutting, opening, joining or repairing a cable, must go to someone qualified. When wording of that kind is detected in what you type, the reading stops entirely and you are given this instead:
Stop using it and do not open, cut or repair anything. Anything to do with mains power, or with a cable that is damaged or getting warm, needs someone qualified — this only helps tell one kind of cable from another.
There is no partial answer in those cases and no way to proceed past it. That is deliberate: a service that gave you four fifths of an answer about a cable that is getting warm would be worse than one that gave you none.
No disposal rules, for anywhere
How cables are meant to be disposed of differs from place to place. Whatever applies where you are is what to follow — this does not cover it.
No recycling scheme, service or organisation is recommended, and no cable is placed into a waste category. Those rules differ by country and often by council, and they change.
No photographs, on any plan
There is no image upload here and there will not be one. Two reasons, and both of them are about being honest rather than about cost:
- The deciding information is a mark smaller than a grain of rice and a line of print running along a jacket. A photograph taken by hand, in ordinary light, almost never resolves either. A photograph that fails to resolve them does not produce silence — it produces a confident wrong answer, and that is the worst possible output.
- Declaring what a cable can do from a picture of it is a specification claim. This service makes none.
Accuracy, and what to do with the output
Automated output can be wrong. A reading is a starting point for your own observation of the object in your hand — never a verdict, never a certificate, and never a substitute for advice from a qualified person. If a reading disagrees with what you can see on the cable, the cable is right.
Your input
What you type is not used to train any model. It is processed to produce your reading and, on paid plans, saved against your account so that you can look back at your own list. The privacy notice has the full account.
Prohibited high-risk uses
This service must not be used for or in connection with medical, legal, financial, safety-related, employment, credit, housing or judicial decisions. Safety is named there for a reason: this tells one kind of cable from another, and that is the whole of what it does.
Questions
support@charlycomtex.shop. If you think a reading was wrong, send it — being told where this is wrong is more useful than almost anything else.