I've taped a LED strip on the back of the display and powered it from one of the USB ports.
By running `uhubctl --vendor 0451 --action toggle --port 4` from the desktop shortcut, I can toggle LED strip on and off, Philips Ambilight-style.
Using on a CI pipeline to dfu flash and devices and run some tests. If anyone has some know to work that I order today let me know!
The switchable host is interesting to me. What do people use that for?
The big issue i encountered is the hub programming software from Microchip is full of bugs and basically unusable and the docs are also a bit wrong. So i had to write a programmer from scratch to remotely program the hub chip registers so they are ready for manufacturing. E.g allocating unique serial number, setting up the chip fuses etc. That actually took most of the time. It programs everything from australia via virtualhere during manufacturing in china. I had trouble with the Great firewall blocking virtualhere half way through too! So i had to turn of ssl
The switchable host im not sure. I dont think many customers use it, I do have a few that use it for switching mouse and keyboard they plugged in. That functionality came with the hub chip so i just wired it up as it didnt cost extra. The hub chip also came with GPIO/uart routing but i didnt hook that part up.
The local USB hub on the shelf was powered from the PC power supply on that shelf, so a single long USB cable from the shelf with the control computer could command the shelf (including the USB hub on the shelf) to fully power up or down, and then control several test devices through the USB hub, and none of the USB devices on the shelf (some of which were bus-powered) needed to worry about not getting sufficient voltage through a long cable and a hub.
Looking for high power USB C hubs that don't do that, but seems most do as part of PD and need isolated slots that don't draw from shared potential... programmatically locking specific power to laptop hub, while others negotiate would be ideal...
Jesus, that was a blast from the past
However, to your point:
> I think especially the cheap hubs will changes the parts used overtime and not update the revision.
Yeah, the last time I purchased them was December 2022, so I definitely don't know for sure that they still work. But they aren't the cheapest hub, so maybe?
But at that time, I purchased hubs from several manufacturers, and most of them didn't work. The first thing I had working was actually an eval kit from an IC vendor.
Also, many hubs that can theoretically be used powered or unpowered are terrible about backfeeding power, either to the host, or (more commonly) to the wall wart.
It's best to either always use the hub unpowered, or to buy a hub that always requires power, unless you've checked and made sure that it's not going to screw you over.
EvanAnderson•1d ago
There's probably a way this could be used to floating batteries at around 80% on devices that support throttling their own charging.