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:

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) and on Mac OS X. It should be possible to compile it for Windows as well - please report if you succeed in doing that.

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
• Windows: TBD?

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

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) 2009-2016 Vadim Mikhailov

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