Turns out there's no easy (if any) way of...

Eric Turns out there's no easy (if any) way of cutting the power to a USB port through software alone. A real let down, was hoping to pull some neat tricks with my USB lit lamp.

8y, 50w 6 replies ¬

🦿 Lucian Marin When you unmount an USB drive it cuts down the power too. Doesn't it work the same for lamps?

8y, 50w 1 reply

Eric That's on instruction, the smart USB device is told to ignore the power, a dumb lamp without anything to think will continue to slurp the drink. Power seems to run through USB ports regardless of the software's mounting or unmounting. On the Pi there seems to be a way to kill the power by tricking it into thinking there's a power error to protect against. This is all theory though, I've not gone through the effort to mess around with it myself after reading so many "no, impossible" answers online.

8y, 50w reply

Mark Dain Maybe you can get a lamp that can change color and control it with an Arduino or Raspberry Pi?

8y, 50w 3 replies

Eric That's what I was thinking, I've seen that it's doable on the Raspberry Pi using a nasty hack (can't find the link right now, I'll shout it to you if you want). On Windows it doesn't look doable however. Even if you disable the USB port completely juice still runs through it - smart devices know not to charge but dumb lamps will continue regardless.

8y, 50w 2 replies