Are your USB ports boring? Do they want some RGB? Effectively, this $6 USB 2.0 Sort-A port from Tensility Worldwide Company, listed through Digi-Key goals to mild up your darkish and dreary USB ports. Hat tip to Arturo182 for bringing this to our consideration.
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Rated for as much as 30V at 3A (90W through USB A?), this RGB USB port makes use of an RGB LED with a typical anode linked to the facility pin. The colours can then be combined by controlling the state of every colour’s cathode pin. Controlling these pins can be the job of a microcontroller, maybe the Raspberry Pi Pico‘s RP2040 on a customized PCB. Within the datasheet, we are able to see that there are two rows of pins. These nearer the entrance of the USB port deal with the usual USB 2 duties. The rear 4 pins are for the LEDs in a Blue, Inexperienced, Voltage, and Crimson configuration. The extra LED pins imply we will not simply drop this half into an present board. As an alternative, they have to be put in right into a customized board with traces routed to ship alerts to the RGB LED. It additionally appears to be like like a typical USB A port, prepared for soldering right into a 1.6mm or much less thick PCB.
As we now have already famous, this port is able to as much as 90W of energy supply, so an attention-grabbing use case can be to set the RGBs to indicate a set voltage. Utilizing a buck converter or voltage regulator, we may set the suitable voltage and set off the microcontroller to light up a colour to point. Say pink for 30V, inexperienced for 12V and blue for 5V? A easy flick of a swap would set the voltage and set off the colour change. Or we may use PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) to combine a selected colour for voltages in between. Whereas this may not be as clear as utilizing a NeoPixel of APA102 RGB LED, it should get the job achieved.
| Ahead Voltage at 20 mA | R | 1.8 – 2.4 V |
| 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 |
| Row 4 – Cell 0 | G | 600 – 1000 mcd |
| Row 5 – Cell 0 | B | 200 – 500 mcd |
This through-hole element is accessible through “lower tape” and “reel.” The previous permits small quantities to be bought for brief runs / particular person tasks. The latter is favored by producers who will load the reel prepared for a choose and place machine to put the parts on a run of boards.
In case you are designing your individual product or have the abilities to retrofit the port into an present construct (not one thing we advocate), then $6 is not so much to ask for slightly bling.