We are glad to announce the USB Insight Hub campaign has been fully funded and we are grateful to all the backers so far. The campaign still has a couple of weeks to go, so don’t miss the opportunity to support the project.

Unfortunately, in order to avoid making the campaign video too long, I had to leave out some secondary features and characteristics. So, in this update I’ll take a closer look at some features and other characteristics that are only briefly mentioned on the Campaign Page. In my opinion (shared by some beta testers), all these features improve the usability of the product. Any questions don’t hesitate to contact us.

Power Control Persistence

The power control for each port is simple and accessible: just a short button press to toggle between On and Off states. Nevertheless, there are three configurations related to the behavior of the power state when USB Insight Hub has a power cycle:

• Each port remembers the last power state (ON or OFF).
• All ports remain OFF at start up.
• All ports turn ON immediately after USB Insight Hub power up.

Power-up Sequence

Having the option of a global power switch and full digital control of the power switch to each port brings the option to implement a staggered power sequence when the hub is powered up. Under which cases you can use it?

• There are one or more USB power hungry devices and you don’t want all of them to be powered up at once, with the risk of triggering overcurrent protection at the upstream port or simply maintaining the stability of the power rail.
• Your test setup requires that two or more devices follow a strict order to operate correctly.
• In some scenarios the order of power up influences the enumeration assignment. A predictable sequence reduces the risk of random assignments to a device.

The configuration in this animation is 4s, 6s and 8s delay for CH1, CH2 and CH3 respectively. The power-up sequencing supersedes the configuration of power control persistence (if enabled).

Display Rotation

Every desktop and workbench setup are unique and fine-tuned for each user’s needs. The ability to rotate screen orientation facilitates the placement of USB Insight Hub in the most convenient place on the desk or bench, according to the port orientation.

Upstream Cable Length

USB Insight Hub does not have an attached “pig-tail” cable as most commercial USB hubs do. Having the option to use USB cables with different lengths between the host and the Hub provides great flexibility on where the Hub can be placed: do you work with a laptop most of the time? Use a short (30 cm) cable; are you dealing with an intricate workbench setup? plug a 1 m cable (included with USB Insight Hub) to route the connection to a distant location. There are a myriad of cables that can suit your situation, including color, flexibility, power carrying capacity, etc.

Charging Protocols

The Renesas uPD720210 USB hub controller implements the 5 Gbps USB3.0 hub functionality, and also provides basic charging protocols still used today in many devices. The three downstream ports of USB Insight Hub have CDP (Charging Downstream Port) and DCP (Dedicated Charging Port) enabled, with a current provision of up to 1.5 A each. Standard Downstream Port (SDP) is implicitly supported. If you are curious about these protocols, here is a good resource.

Upstream USB Type-C CC1 and CC2 Signals

The inclusion of USB Type-C connectors brings some quirks and tricks. This can take you down a deep rabbit-hole, but the two most important signals are CC1 and CC2 that are required in applications with USB Type-C connectors as they provide several functions: cable orientation, power configuration (power delivery), VCONN configuration, data roles, among others.

USB Insight Hub Data /Pwr port monitors CC1 and CC2 to know the orientation of the cable and route the USB 3.0 signals properly to the USB Hub chip and allows it to know the current capabilities of the source by reading the voltage in CC1/CC2; the later monitoring is also true for the auxiliary power.

All the wiring is ready and operational (that is why the reversible position is identified and the signals routed properly) but is still work in progress how to show this information in the displays.

Host Communication

As you may have noticed, USB Insight Hub has three ports, instead of four as in other commercial devices. The reason is that the fourth port of the USB hub chip is internally routed to the ESP32 USB interface in order to connect to the host computer. We are using TinyUSB as USB drivers, and more specifically, the CDC class to implement a virtual serial link with the agent software running in the computer. This allows to leverage on this powerful library that has a huge community behind it and avoid the usage of custom drivers. The agent software (named Enumeration Extraction Program) analyzes the device tree, matches the devices with the ports in USB Insight Hub, and sends the enumeration information as JSON text strings. In addition, a full API will be in place to allow the control and monitoring of the USB Insight Hub with JSON strings, so you can create custom scripts in any program that supports serial communications.

Stemma QT and Free ESP32 Pins

We left a JST SH connector with Stemma QT pinout to connect any 3.3 V boards like a temperature/humidity sensor, light sensors, etc., or use the two IO pins for other kind of applications. In addition, four of the free pins of the ESP32 are available as header pins at board level, ideal for debugging.

Don’t forget to visit our campaign page to get your own USB Insight Hub!