



UPDATE: As of later revisions, the Raspberry Pi designers choose to remove the polyfuses. Therefore, this article is only valid for the first revision boards only. You can identify your board revisions by searching the Raspberry Pi forums. However, the USB hot-swap issue still remains thus the second half of the article can be useful to some Raspi hackers.













On the "Voltage Droop" issue









USB allows users to plug and unplug USB devices while the PC is still in operation. When an USB

device is plugged into a port, inrush current occur as the newly plugged device’s internal bypass capacitor

charges to its full potential. This current is drawn from the USB VBUS power plane of the motherboard and

causes the VBUS to sag momentarily.





(520mV sag upon device connection = more kernel panics + random restarts)

























Therefore, an additional mod that could improve the hot swapping performance of high-current USB devices (like hard disks) is to use an additional low ESR capacitor between the power lines of the ports. If you look closely at the schematic, the bypass bulk-storage capacitor C32 is only 47uF. This is way too low for spec 2.0 compliance. I quote a whitepaper from usb.org "In accordance to the USB Specification Revision 2.0, the VBUS power lines must be bypassed with no less than 120µF capacitance of low-ESR capacitance per USB port." Thus, if your high-current device still behaves erratically even when you bridged the fuses and used a 2A power supply, try to place a 150uF cap between the Vusb and Gnd. If things still don't work, you can then safely proceed to blame it on the software guys.

If you don't know why the fuses were installed in the first place, please do not attempt this mod. Obviously, to take advantage of the polyfuse mod, you need to have a power supply that can match up the total system power consumption at full load. (For what it's worth, I've had wlan adapters peaking at 480mA during Tx...)





Additional info:

As many of you might already know, the USB host ports of the Raspberry Pi are current-limited toper port. I find this absolutelyfor such a revolutionary device to have that kind of limitation. The 'official' way around this is using a powered USB hub, but I hate the idea of adding unnecessary complexity to a project.My way around this is to bridge the polyfuses(F1,F2) seated next to the USB ports.This surprisingly simple mod will allow you to feed higher powered devices like certain wlan adapters directly from the RasPi's power supply line without throwing a kernel panic every 33.5 seconds. With a 5V 3A power supply, I even managed to get an external hard disk(yes, of thekind) powered directly off the USB port, although I had to bridge the main 700mA polyfuse to get reliable operation and use a SHORT data cable. [Short cables will minimize steady-state voltage drops due to cable resistance in high-current applications]This issue is particularly annoying if you try to hot swap higher current devices, as it causes the SoC to reset due to a sudden voltage sag.That temporary sag you see above will occur even with an overpowered power supply.Sticky note: