USB Battery Charging and the Amazon Kindle Fire

Posted on 08. Feb, 2012 by in Using

This is the new USB Battery Charging Standard in action with the Kindle Fire and the $19.95 Plugable 4 Port HUB with 2.5A Adapter and BC 1.1 support.

As both support the new standard, you can fast charge — even without a computer attached.

A few notes:

* The Kindle Fire has a standard USB micro-B connector, but the Fire doesn’t come with a USB cable in the box. You’ll need to buy that separately (in the video, we show using a cable borrowed from a Kindle Touch).

* The Kindle Fire will actually charge at up to 850mA. The video shows it pulling 650mA, because the Kindle is almost fully charged.

* The Apple iPad/iPod/iPhone are *not* BC 1.1 compliant, so this support is of no use for charging those devices at a faster rate. And the iPad won’t charge while the screen is on when connected to any standard USB 2.0 hub.

If you’re curious about our measurement rig, it’s a nice simple setup – just a multimeter and some passive components. Give a comment if it would be helpful for us to post the components we used.

We welcome any comments. Thanks!

Plugable’s New USB 2.0 2-Port Hub

Posted on 30. Dec, 2011 by in USB2-2PORT

The newest small and light laptops and tablets don’t have enough USB ports.

Because of that, it’s nice to be able to throw a small USB hub in your bag for extra connectivity when you’re travelling. You want a durable hub without any parts sticking out that are easy to break. Where the hub is a single integrated unit, so nothing will get disconnected and lost. With ports that are in line with the cable, so cables aren’t running all directions on your desk when you’re using it. And a hub without so many ports that it needs its own power adapter anyway (which would be too bulky).

It’s for these kinds of needs that we’re targeting our simple new USB 2.0 2-Port Hub.

It features a clean, compact design. With a standard USB 2.0 High Speed hub controller inside (NEC/Renesas µPD720114 2-port), it enables two devices to share a single available USB port with full USB 2.0 compatibility and performance.

Because it’s bus powered, the 2 ports share the available 500 mA from the single upstream port. It’s a perfect match for use with low powered devices such as keyboards and mice or self powered devices like printers, powered hubs, and powered external hard drives. Note, though, that you won’t want to use an unpowered hub like this for charging.

Features

  • Standard 2 Port USB 2.0 compliant USB hub controller chipset
  • Compatible with all USB 2.0 and 1.1 devices
  • Supports full data rates of 1.5/12/480 Mbps
  • USB bus powered
  • Compact, in-line design to minimize cable clutter

Have any questions? Email support@plugable.com anytime – we’ll be happy to help.

Where to Buy

Plugable USB 2.0 2 Port Hub Product Details $9.20

DisplayLink’s Latest Windows Drivers (6.1 M0)

Posted on 17. Dec, 2011 by in Windows

DisplayLink has had two major updates to their Windows driver package this fall: 6.0 M1 and the newly released 6.1 M0.

For Plugable’s USB 2.0 products with DisplayLink chips, however, we’re still recommending earlier DisplayLink Windows driver version 5.6 M1 (5.6.31870.0), because of its proven stability. For now, Windows Update will still deliver 5.6 M1 automatically when you plug a Plugable device in.

Here’s a little background on why:

DisplayLink’s newest 6.x drivers work with all DisplayLink chips (USB 2.0 and the coming USB 3.0 generation), but the primary development focus of version 6.x has been on enabling the coming USB 3.0 generation of products. Perhaps as a result, there are some minor tradeoffs for USB 2.0 generation devices.

Here are the tradeoffs we’re following:

1) On a few systems, screens may go blank after returning from a reboot or power event. The cause appears to be changes in the way display configuration information is stored with the 6.0 and 6.1 drivers – Windows and the drivers can get confused, and that confusion will persist across unplugs, reboots, etc (going back to 5.6 M1 is the solution in these cases)
2) The uninstaller on version 6.1 fails to uninstall from Windows’ Programs and Features (as a workaround, you can use the DisplayLink “cleaner” utility).
3) 5.6 M1 is the last release where DisplayLink’s logs are readable. When we hit any strange problems on a customer’s system, our ability to analyze the logs to find the underlying problems (and solutions) is one of the ways we try to provide better support for Plugable brand devices.

All that said, we run the latest drivers on nearly all of our own systems (so we can stay up to date with the latest developments), and generally they’re great. So if there are any 6.x features or fixes that are relevant to you, feel free to download and install 6.1 M0 or later to give it a try. You can always download the latest DisplayLink driver here. And we expect that with one of the coming releases, we’ll push forward our recommendation to the latest version.

For those considering the latest versions, here’s the features and fixes DisplayLink has delivered since 5.6 M1 (as of version 6.1 M0). We’ve cut down the list to just those appear to be relevant to USB 2.0 devices.

New features since 5.6 M1 (as of 6.1 M0):

- Improved video smoothness for DL-1×0, DL-1×5 and DL-3×00 series
- Improved frame rate
- Reduced CPU utilization
- DisplayLink Tray applet enhancements

(Note these are generally subtle improvements)

New fixes since 5.6 M1 (as of 6.1 M0):

Sometimes the DisplayLink screen will remain blank when the device is
re-plugged after having been disconnected during power save. (11708)

Moving a mouse over full-screen video playback causes quality to drop. (12409)

Sometimes DisplayLink screen comes on in clone mode instead of extending when
connecting the device for the very first time. (10217)

Sometimes video may freeze on DisplayLink monitor. (11333)

Other miscellaneous fixes

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