 The great search brought to you by digikey and it read every single weekly data user power engineer and help you. Yes, you Find the things you need on digikey.com lead data. What are you looking for this week? Okay? so this week One of the projects that people really liked on the socials on the threads and the blue skies is our illumini USB hub. Let's go to the over. It's called Skeet Sorry on the Skeets So let's go to the overhead and I'll show off this design So this is a really simple USB mini hub, so it's got USB-C here, that's the host to the host and then here are four ports with power data plus data minus and ground And this is just using an SL 2.1 chip, which is a very inexpensive common USB hub chip That's like all it does is the ports and it's it's not very smart I hate to call things dumb, but it's not a very smart chip. It's a very basic chip It doesn't do anything's like overcurrent protection. It doesn't do anything like indicating when the port's active You can't change the vidpid or enumeration strings. It's very simple And it's also a little big like it only really comes in this large so I see and one thing that I you know wanted to note is that while These USB hubs are of course good if you're like, oh, I have a lot of things on my desk Or I want to integrate a product and I have a keyboard and mouse. I want them to you know Go through one port or maybe you're doing some like security hacking and you want it to look like a keyboard But really it's a disk drive or whatever Having a USB hub and your embedded design could be really useful like for example if you have a microcontroller that has native USB and You also have a debug port that's over USB serial now You have two USB ports and it could be like it can be all clunky looking It might not be expensive to just have a hub chip instead and I've seen I've definitely seen dev boards that have the native USB and then a debugger to like FT 232 H or whatever or A simsys dap chip they would use a little hub on the dev board and that allows you to have both USB ports, you know connected without having to worry about like which is the debug which is the upload Oh, there's like too many ports. So That can be handy note, of course that if your native USB can be a host This isn't gonna work for you because it's only for like client downstream, right? Does the data can't go you can't have two hosts connected? But I still think it'd be interesting. So if you're having embedded Linux chips and they do come quite small You're using the embedded Linux board. It has a USB host port or host pins and you want to connect keyboard mouse Touch controller camera, whatever and you want it to only go through one USB You want to have only one USB connection To the upstream host controller These chips would do a good job. So let's check out what we can find on Digi-Key For USB Hubs, let's go to the computer and let's go find USB hub Now, of course, you're gonna have the hubs themselves like Desktop hubs. That's what most people think of and of course you can use those too, but we want to have just the chips So let's go to Controllers, I think that's actually what it is. So this is an interface controller and yeah, and now we're talking like a hub controller Qfn. Now, there's a couple companies that kind of like dominate this as an Infineon and TI and microchip So let's let's just look for active PC. Sorry USB Let's look for stuff that's in stock and exclude marketplace. So we're just looking for what's available like right now and For USB interfaces, all these look good. It can do a USB 2 or 3 If you need 3 of course Select that A lot of these are stand-alones, but yeah, you'll see like Infineon microchip, Renaissance and TI are kind of like the The big ones in this market So The ones, you know, they're all gonna work quite well. All of them are gonna obey like the USB specification But one thing that kind of liked was there is this series that 25 1x's From microchip and these come in a very cute like 28 Qfn. This is really tiny And this is a two-port hub again Could be good for I've seen this on dev boards where it's like one there's a two-port hub to one USB C or micro B and it connects with the debug and the device USB or the debug and the USB serial converter through one connection and This is from SMC originally and then got purchased by microchip So very simple like this 28 pin 1 is just like it's just upstream You put a crystal usually you do have to have a crystal on these because you have to have good timing and then Downstream fine, that's it and then each one Does have There's the data pins. There's the detection pins. This is what you're gonna get for If you're going from like the SL 2.1 to something like this USB 2x series you're gonna get more pins that tell you what's going on so you can Do power enabling and disabling you can do overcurrent sensing and You can do You know bootstrap, it's like I guess you can make it so devices can't be removed Filters of course the crystal reset pin which is kind of nice if you want you're using it in a embedded setup I've noticed sometimes it's nice to be able to like reset the USB, especially when devices start acting finicky. They can take down the hub and This one doesn't have any configuration that can be done over I squared C, but there is I Think this one the 2512 Let me find it Yeah, this one it actually has an interesting configuration set up You can either connect like your standard 24 LC 04 e-prom and the e-prom has the register Values that you want in it or you can control it from an I squared C controller and you can set up all sorts of Specifications like you scroll down Yeah so you can set up the max power output the USB Enumeration whether you want to have it be able to do battery charging so like no data lines are connected, but you're still providing power And looks like you can do some like port mapping and port swapping to port mapping yes Port mapping the downstream ports can be reordered disabled in a sequence for multiple left from Zion Hmm oh looks like you can swap Port one and two and three and four which can be be handy for your for your configuration, but particularly what I like is that you can set up the USB VID and PID and that can be handy. So like when people plug it in If you are using it to like combine two chips on one dev board It's not gonna show up as the microchip like people gonna say oh I thought this was an eight of food design, but when I plug it in it says like microchip hub instead You can have it reuse your VID and PID so we'll still say You know a to fruit ESP 32 dev kit with built-in debugger and I'll show up in there on the USB The pop-up that comes up on macro windows So this one, you know even though this has a little bit more pins. I actually really liked this one I think I did do a design For this let me see if I can find it development No, I was under breakout No, not the MCP. I did do a Design again, I couldn't get chips for a while in 2021. I did a quick lay out of this this family see Eagle can wants to load up So you can see it's it's similar to The breakout I showed earlier except at the time I was using micro USB I wanted to keep it nice and slim it's got that cute QFN chip and then I squirt see you can configure over Like the stem of QT or you you know have it broken out over here, but this is a two-port Converter with USB host broken out and I squirt see configurability. So I like this one. This is gonna be my pick This one And it's pretty expensive. It's you know, you you can get ones that I think go down to like a dollar fifty depending on You know number of ports and whether it has the I squirt see interface But this one I like and it's plenty in stock. So check out The 25 USB to XXX series. There's two port three port and four port versions But I think if you're gonna integrate this into your own development board This USB port gives you debugging serial or mouse and keyboard And all you need one port. It's only a couple bucks. So check out these cool USB hub. It could be very handy for your next design And That's our show for this evening. Thank you so much everybody for joining us. We very much appreciate your time We'll see everybody during the week. We have ask engineer Chantel 3d hangouts JP's workshop deep dive we also have ton of other things going on Lots of surprises and you're all the socials of people like are you on the yes? Yeah, we're on whatever's the Threads guy. Yeah, we're on the skippity-pap. Skippity-pap Dash dash. We'll talk to everyone later. Thanks so much. Thanks everybody. Have a great night. Have a great week