uhubctl is utility to control USB power per-port on smart USB hubs. Smart hub is defined as one that implements per-port power switching.

Original idea for this code was inspired by hub-ctrl.c by Niibe Yutaka: http://www.gniibe.org/development/ac-power-control-by-USB-hub

Note that very few hubs actually support per-port power switching. Some of them are no longer manufactured and can be hard to find.

This is list of known compatible USB hubs:

This table is by no means complete. If your hub works with uhubctl, but is not listed above, please report it by opening new issue at https://github.com/mvp/uhubctl/issues, so we can add it to supported table. In your report, please provide exact product model and add output from uhubctl.

Some modern motherboards have built-in root hubs that do support this feature, but you need to use option -i to enable it.

This utility was tested to compile and work on Linux (Ubuntu, Redhat/Fedora/CentOS), FreeBSD and Mac OS X.

While uhubctl compiles on Windows, USB power switching does not work on Windows because libusb is using winusb.sys driver, which according to Microsoft does not support necessary USB control requests. This may be fixed if libusb starts supporting different driver on Windows.

First, you need to install library libusb-1.0 (version 1.0.12 or later):

• Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev
• Redhat: sudo yum install libusb1-devel
• MacOSX: brew install libusb, or sudo port install libusb-devel
• FreeBSD: libusb is included by default
• Windows: TBD?

To compile, simply run make - this will generate uhubctl binary.

Alternatively, for macOS you can build an executable with homebrew's custom tap:

brew tap mvp/uhubctl https://github.com/mvp/uhubctl/
brew install --HEAD uhubctl

You can control the power on a USB port(s) like this:

uhubctl -a off -p 235

This means operate on default smart hub and turn power off (-a off, or -a 0) on ports 2,3,5 (-p 235). Supported actions are off/on/cycle (or 0/1/2). cycle means turn power off, wait some delay (configurable with -d) and turn it back on.

On Linux, you may need to run it with sudo, or to configure udev USB permissions.

If you have more than one smart USB hub connected, you should choose specific hub to control using -l (location) parameter.

Copyright (C) 2009-2017 Vadim Mikhailov

This file can be distributed under the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License version 2.