BIG7 USB hub is a 7-port USB hub designed for Raspberry Pi, and it allows your Raspberry Pi to connect more USB devices at a time. When using it with Raspberry Pi 3, you can use the 4 pogo pins (included in package) to finish the connection without using a USB cable.
Now we have a new revision of BIG7 USB hub. The newer revision looks very similar with the older one (see the picture below), and it introduces a new feature that allows user to turn on/off the power of USB ports via software or external switch.
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From the picture you can see the new unpopulated pin header (P7), which contains ENABLE and GND pins. The ENABLE pin is pulled up to 3.3V by default, if you short it to the GND pin, BIG7 will cut off the power for all USB ports. This feature is useful when you want to save power consumption from the USB devices, or you want to fully reset the USB devices without rebooting the system.
You can connect an external switch to the P7 on board, and use it to turn on/off the power of USB devices.
external_switch
You can also connect the two pins in P7 to Raspberry Pi’s GPIO header, and control the power of USB ports via software. The ENABLE pin is in 3.3V level, so it is safe to connect it directly to Raspberry Pi’s GPIO header. Below is an example that uses GPIO-23 (BCM naming) to turn on/off the USB devices. You can use any software or library to set the status of GPIO pin.
gp23_control_power
The new revision does not include the short USB cable in the package. The pricing is the same with the older revision.
BIG7 USB Hub Rev2 is now in stock.