StickHub - The Space Friendly 7-Port USB 2 Hub

The StickHub is now also included with KiCad as demo: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/tree/master/demos/stickhub

The lovely organic looking curved traces are one of the features of the upcoming version 6 of KiCad and can be seen in action in the board pictures in the previous log.

Here's two pictures I received of the very first assembled board:

Just a quick update: Shenzhen's elves are hard at work to ship out some prototype StickHubs, which hopefully get mailed out of the country before they go out and celebrate their own New Year.

Update on the update, some quick snaps of the boards before they get assembled:

A lot of small tweaks based on this Reddit PCB review request. One fairly visible tweak is to add an optional 6.3mm 'ESC style' mounted capacitor to more than double the downstream port capacitance:

There was also a bug in the schematic where the power switch wouldn't turn on. Option 1 was to keep the power sequencing and feed the hub IC directly from the USB plug to have the 1.8V to turn on the Dialog switch, or (option 2) tie the 'ON' pin of the Dialog switch to 'Vin' and let it protect all of the device, dropping any power sequencing. Since it's a bare PCB and the solution would be simpler I went with no. 2.

Several people pointed out it might be wise to do a little more power management than straight-up passing the 5V downstream. In specific this dialog. Looking for a solution that wouldn't compromise the device in terms of size and costs I came across the very affordable Dialog SLG5NT1487V load switch to switch off the hub power on any short circuit and regulate the inrush current of the newly added capacitors for the downstream ports. To keep things small all downstream ports share two ceramic capacitor banks made up of 22uF caps.

The power switch enable is tied to the hub 1.8V supply, which is the last to turn on according to the datasheet.

The implementation of above looks like this: