You’ve most likely seen USB hubs with bodily switches for every port, they supply a helpful option to reduce the ability to particular person units, however provided that you’re shut sufficient to flip them. They received’t do you a lot good if you wish to pull the plug on a USB gadget remotely.
That’s why [Jim Heaney] created the I2C-USB-Hub. The system takes your commonplace USB 2.0 hub circuit, and provides in a MT9700 P-MOSFET load swap for every port. The allow pin on every of those switches is in flip linked to one of many output pins of a PCA9557PW I2C I/O chip. Which means controlling every port is as simple as sending the right sequence of bits over the wire, although [Jim] says he does plan on writing up an Arduino library to make flipping the digital switches a bit of extra consumer pleasant.
For the reason that 8-bit chip had just a few additional pins left over, [Jim] wired one as much as function a grasp management for the LED indicator lights on the PCB. One other is used to regulate the present restrict on the MT9700 between 500 mA and 1 A.
Whereas naturally we’re large followers of spinning up your individual {hardware} right here at Hackaday, we’ve additionally seen comparable outcomes achieved by modifying an off-the-shelf USB hub.