Back at Ladyada's Desk! Doing bringup on PORT AUTHORITY our 'smart' controllable USB HUB

All right, Lady Ada. What is this? >> Okay, we're back to my desk and I'm working on Port Authority. This is like the hardware hub I always wanted that actually does things you want a hub to do, like being able to turn off individual ports. And also it has XH connector, so if you want to have like hard connected stuff, you don't have to depend on these USB A's. So the demo here is running on my Raspberry Pi because Linux has the best I think it's called U hub control support. And I made a little demo here. So as I turn off each port and you can look over here, you can see the LED for power going on and off. And there's also over here an INA 3221 current sensor and you can see the current sensor resistors. So the first three ports also have current monitoring as well. So not only can you turn on and off the port remotely, but over I squared C here, you can run a a little driver to read in Python the current and voltage on each of the first three ports. Fourth port doesn't doesn't have monitoring. Um some other things about this that are great, you know, upstream USB. This is a true MTT hub. This is the USB 2514. It has I squared C support also. You can set I squared C in a little connector here. You can have it be like default on. You can use I squared C to do support control. There's also an EEPROM on here. Little EEPROM. Little guy. If you want to pre-burn stuff like changing the VID, PID, the naming and stuff so you can individually identify them really easily. External protected 5 volt either from terminal block or DC and this is a protection circuit over here to make sure you don't have over 5 volts. It'll do auto cut off if you get over like 5.4 volts. Um this is the hub, the crystal, protection on every port, both current protection and ESD protection. And oh, there's also Mikey really wanted this so you can just turn off the whole hub at once with an on-off switch so it completely disables the whole thing. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So, yeah, so this is a four-port version. Also, the design is supposed to be stackable. So, these you'd put standoffs here, and you'd be able to stack these up so you could have, you know, a whole bunch of them up in a in a big tower. So, if you wanted like a large number of hubs, and of course, each one is USB 2.0 2480 megabit per second. This is like a This is like a really nice hub chip from Microchip. So, you could have like lots of ports. So, if you're doing like a hardware-in-the-loop farm, or you just want like a hub that doesn't suck, this is going to be a And then, the seven-port version is being designed now. It's a little bit wider or deeper, but it has seven ports across the front. It uses vertical ports. So, that'll be coming out next. But, so far, so good. >> Yep. And then, we have other stuff on the desk here. We're doing a lot of testing of the resolution for printing on PCBs. And then, of course, if you're with us this long in the video, you're probably either you like all we do, or you're trying to look for something we did wrong. It's same same vibe. This works with all of your whatever you want to call them agents, agentic hardware, all the things that you will say, "Hey, test all this stuff." >> Like, so for >> [laughter] >> what >> Hardware-in-the-loop testing is really >> But, even non-hardware-in-the-loop, like I always wanted a hub that has like true individual port control and current monitoring. This is so handy for bringing up new hardware. And current limiting. And it doesn't use one of those crummy like, "Oh, there's just a random-ass like DC jack, and you don't know the size, and you don't know if it's protected." >> A lot goes into our hardware designs more than more than the final thing. There's a story. So, how did we get here? Why are we doing this? Why did it take so many years? Okay, I'm going to post this up. We're back. >> Back.