Monoprice 7-port USB Hub for Raspberry Pi [day 14 of 20-days-of-posts series]

The Monoprice 7-port USB hub is Raspberry Pu friendly.

The hub is powered by a 2amp power brick.  The power brick is fairly slim -- in a power bar, it would prevent another brick being plugged into the plugs next to it, but it does provide enough clearing to allow someone to plug a power cable into adjacent plugs.  The hub will provide enough power (1amp) to power the Pi.  Unlike other high-powered USB hubs that I have tried, the hub will provide greater than 0.5amp to device connected to it even though there is no host connected to it.  This is critical.  A lot of other hubs I have tried, they will provide high-power to a USB device connected to the hub only if there is an established host connection to the hub.  Therefore, if you try to connect a Pi to the hub, it is not able to provide enough power to the Pi to start it up because there is no host connected to the hub.  The Pi needs to be powered up before it will establish a host connection with the hub.

With the Monoprice 7-port USB hub, the hub will provide enough power the usb connections to power the Pi up even before the host connection is established.  This is witnessed by a red light on the hub, which indicates it is powered on.  When the Pi itself is powered on and started, blue lights will turn on the hub to indicate connections of those devices to the host have been established.

The hub also prevents backpowering over the USB host connect.  This allow for a switch to actually work.  Without this ability, the power switch would be futile as the Pi would become powered on automatically via the host connection between the Pi and hub when the hub gets powered on.

The hub will provide 5 USB side connections and 2 USB top connections.

The hub can be disassembled.  The plastic case is easily removed.

 The board could be integrated in your Raspberry Pi case design, as I have in my headless Pi server.