Controlling a USB power supply (on/off) with linux

Question

Is it possible to turn on/off power supplies from USB manually with linux?

There's this external USB cooling fan (the kind you use to cool yourself off, not the PC), and it would be nice to be able to control it from the terminal, because I want to position the fan somewhere far away.

I suppose this could also be useful for a variety of other things as well, because there's a lot of USB toys out there. Maybe air purifiers etc (I heard they don't really work though).

Answer 1

According to the docs, there were several changes to the USB power management from kernels 2.6.32, which seem to settle in 2.6.38. Now you'll need to wait for the device to become idle, which is governed by the particular device driver. The driver needs to support it, otherwise the device will never reach this state. Unluckily, now the user has no chance to force this. However, if you're lucky and your device can become idle, then to turn this off you need to:

echo "0" > "/sys/bus/usb/devices/usbX/power/autosuspend"
echo "auto" > "/sys/bus/usb/devices/usbX/power/level"

or, for kernels around 2.6.38 and above:

echo "0" > "/sys/bus/usb/devices/usbX/power/autosuspend_delay_ms"
echo "auto" > "/sys/bus/usb/devices/usbX/power/control"

This literally means, go suspend at the moment the device becomes idle.

So unless your fan is something "intelligent" that can be seen as a device and controlled by a driver, you probably won't have much luck on current kernels.

Answer 2

I wanted to do this, and with my USB hardware I couldn't. I wrote a hacky way how to do it here: http://pintant.cat/2012/05/12/power-off-usb-device/ . In short way: I used a USB relay to open/close the Vc of another USB cable...

Answer 3

echo '2-1' |sudo tee /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usb/unbind

works for ubuntu

Answer 4

USB 5v power is always on (even when the computer is turned off, on some computers and on some ports.) You will probably need to program an Arduino with some sort of switch, and control it via Serial library from USB plugged in to the computer.

In other words, a combination of this switch tutorial and this tutorial on communicating via Serial libary to Arduino plugged in via USB.

Answer 5

PowerTOP from Intel allows you to toggle devices such as usb peripherals in real-time. These are called 'tunables'.

sudo apt install powertop
sudo powertop

• Tab over to 'tunables'.
• Scroll down to your device.
• Hit enter to toggle power saving mode (Good/Bad)

Note that Bad means the device is always on. Toggling to Good will turn off the device after the preset inactive saving time (default is 2000ms).

See the PowerTOP docs for details on how to make these changes permanent.
It generates the config scripts for you (pretty much as described by other posters on this thread).

NOTE: These scripts do not affect USB pin power (which is always on).
These only send the driver protocol to activate and deactivate a device.

If you want to control pin power, you could use either a supported smart USB hub, or better yet a microcontroller.

Answer 6

Note. The information in this answer is relevant for the older kernels (up to 2.6.32). See tlwhitec's answer for the information on the newer kernels.

# disable external wake-up; do this only once
echo disabled > /sys/bus/usb/devices/usb1/power/wakeup 

echo on > /sys/bus/usb/devices/usb1/power/level       # turn on
echo suspend > /sys/bus/usb/devices/usb1/power/level  # turn off

(You may need to change usb1 to usb n)

Source: Documentation/usb/power-management.txt.gz