
Dedicated USB Ports Add RGB Bling for Your Next Maker Project
Are your USB ports boring? Do they want some RGB? Effectively, this $6 USB 2.0 Sort-A port from Tensility Worldwide Company, Listed via Digi-Key It goals to brighten up your darkish and gloomy USB ports. hat tip Arturo182 For bringing this to our consideration.
Rated as much as 30V at 3A (90W over USB A), this RGB USB port makes use of an RGB LED with a standard anode linked to the ability pin. Colours can then be blended by checking the situation of every shade’s cathode pin. Controlling these pins could be the job of a microcontroller, maybe the Raspberry Pi Pico’s RP2040 on a customized PCB. Inside data sheet, we are able to see that there are two rows of needles. These close to the entrance of the USB port carry out commonplace USB 2 duties. The 4 pins on the again are for LEDs in Blue, Inexperienced, Voltage and Pink configurations. Extra LED pins imply we will not simply depart this half on an present board. As a substitute, they should be put in on a particular board with oriented traces to ship alerts to the RGB LED. It additionally seems like a typical USB A port able to solder onto a PCB with a thickness of 1.6mm or much less.
As we talked about earlier, this port is able to powering as much as 90W, so setting the RGBs to show a sure voltage could be an attention-grabbing use case. Utilizing a converter or voltage regulator, we are able to set the suitable voltage and set off the microcontroller to mild up a shade to point it. Say purple for 30V, inexperienced for 12V, and blue for 5V. A easy contact of the button units the voltage and triggers the colour change. Or we are able to use PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) to combine a specific shade for voltages in between. Whereas this is not as clear as utilizing the NeoPixel APA102 RGB LED, it ought to work.
Ahead Voltage at 20 mA | R | 1.8 – 2.4V |
Row 1 – Cell 0 | G | 2.7 – 3.5 V |
Row 2 – Cell 0 | B | 2.7 – 3.5 V |
Luminous Depth at 20 mA | R | 400 – 800 mcd |
Line 4 – Cell 0 | G | 600 – 1000 mcd |
Line 5 – Cell 0 | B | 200 – 500 mcd |
This perforated element is accessible via “reduce tape” and “reel”. The primary permits the acquisition of small portions for short-term/particular person tasks. The latter is most popular by producers who will place elements on a set of boards by getting the reel prepared for a decide and place machine.
When you’re designing your personal product or have the abilities to adapt the port to an present construct (not one thing we advocate), then $6 is not an excessive amount of to ask for a little bit bling.
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