USB hubs are a thing I prefer to stock on, since I really often use these in my projects . Threrefore, just when I was running low on ’em, I ordered a bunch in bulk from china. Took about a month, till our slowpoke-post delivered those.
Anyway, being pessimisticby default, I started by doing an lsusb -vv on the hub device:
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Tag: usb
Beware: USB killer-hubs
A few days ago a friend told me he had a nasty crash. An externally-powered USB hub screwed up his motherboard on the laptop just after he plugged in the power brick. He even showed me that hub. A 10-port hub just like the one I got from china (DX or aliexpress – I do not recall). The only difference – he picked up his at a local shop for twice its actual price. So, once I got to my lab, I cracked mine open to have a look what the heck could deal such a damage.
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USB Sniffo dongle
Well, another weekend, and another project. This time, once I got to my lab, I had to debug a DIY usb dongle (avr based, stuffed with vusb framework). And… Well, things didn’t work out of the box this time and I got a bunch of glitches.
So, I decided to finally make a dongle for sniffing usb transactions. The idea was flying around for some time, and it seems to me someone has already done something similar at HaD. Well, I was too lazy to search.
It was a pretty simple one – just 2 ports, some pins for easy oscilloscope access and three leds, activated via a jumper. One for power line, and 2 for D+ D- lines.
This time, as recommended by a friend of mine I didn’t remove the toner (Thanks, Inky!). Once the thing was ready, I applied some urethane spray, so that the whole thing would last longer.
As usual here go the kicad schematics and pcb layout files, including ready to pring PostScript, if you’re gonna make one for yourself: sniffo.tar.gz