Why would changing to an active USB cable result in Z-Wave saying "Failed to connect: Cannot connect to host"

Configuration Z-Wave
1

I’ve had mixed signal quality results with an old, cheap, three-foot USB extender cable attached to my Home Assistant Yellow box. I attached a 16-foot Monoprice “USB 2.0 Active Extension / Repeater” cable to my box and put my Zooz ZST39 LR stick on the end so I could reposition the stick.

Upon restarting the HA Yellow box, the blue light on the stick came on, so there was a physical connection. However, for the Z-Wave integration, HA Core 2024.11.3 kept saying, Failed setup, will retry: Failed to connect: Cannot connect to host aod7b954-zwavejs2mqtt:3000 ssl:default [Connect call failed ('172.30.33.0', 3000)].

I went to System -> Hardware -> All Hardware and searched through the hardware devices, but no Z-Wave devices were there.

I reattached my original cable and restarted the box. All was fine.

Why would an active cable cause a problem, even though there seemed to be a physical connection? Can anyone recommend a cable that’s at least 10 feet that does not cause a problem?

Thank you!

2

The USB standard have a max length of 5m, which is around 16 feet.
Many vendors have implementations that can only handle around 3m, which would be around 10 feet.

Then there is also the possibility that you got a charging only cable.
It is not really part of the USB standard, but some vendors do make them anyway and usually there is no indication on them to distinguish them from “real” USB cables.

3

Thanks for your response. Those are certainly a valid pitfalls to watch out for, but it appears this particular cable was intended to carry data.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009GUTFX8

4

Cable is only part of the equation.
With vendors I also meant the vendors of the USB ports/devices in each end.

I do not know the monoprice brand, but I would not trust an Amazon page for a device description unless it was for a known brand where brand name is meant to last as a beacon of quality.