On 4/3/12 5:26 PM, Ian Lepore wrote:
On Tue, 2012-04-03 at 17:13 -0500, Ron McDowell wrote:
I just got a little USB powered fan and it sure would be nice if I could
have cron on my FreeBSD box turn it on or off at certain times by
switching off the 5V line on a USB port.  Anyone know how I can do
that?  Thanks.

BTW this is a pretty decent fan for the money. :)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0033WSDOM/


The usbconfig(8) command has power_on and power_off commands.  I've
never used them so I can't say for sure they'll do what you want.

-- Ian

The good news is that "usbconfig -u 4 -a 5 power_off|power_on" works fine.

Hardware is a Dell Latitude D-430 notebook running:
FreeBSD d430 10.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 10.0-CURRENT #0 r232714M: Fri Mar 9 12:41:34 CST 2012 rcm@d430:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC amd64

When booting up, the fan powers up just as:
uhub7: <vendor 0x413c product 0xa005, class 9/0, rev 2.00/25.07, addr 5> on usbus4
shows up, which was a pretty good clue to what device it is.

Automatically turning it on is pure laziness on my part... turning it off is more about forgetfulness though. :)

On 4/3/12 5:45 PM, Devin Teske wrote:
Alternatively, you could just plug your USB fan into your monitor. A fellow engineer and I discovered that most monitors power-down the USB ports when entering power-save mode (with Dell, HP, and Viewsonic, this is whenever the screen blanks due to inactivity; are you using DPMS and/or greensaver?). Walking away from the PC will cause the fan to [eventually] turn off, while waggling the mouse brings it back to life.

Devin, sorry, my monitor is too old to have USB ports on it...if it did that would be even a better solution.

Thanks for the help everyone!


--
Ron McDowell
San Antonio TX

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