Thread: Epia USB Stays On

hey never mind apparnetly thats how epia's work .... so u can acivate it witht a mouse movement.

Anyway .... does anyone know if this will cause any prolonged problems? to devices we hook up to the USB?? And does anyone know is this all usb ports or just the direect oens in the back??

If that actually gets in your way, you can get an external powered hub. Cut open the USB cable leading to the HUB and sever the voltage line. Then wire the hub to your power supply, so that you can control when it's on/off, aka when the devices you connect to it get power or not.

it doeesnt bother me per se .... just was wondering if this is gonna cause any long term problems? Since the gps will always be on, and all that other stuff?

in the bios you should be able to turn it off

My serial port stays on too.

It hasn't drained my battery yet

I use my car every day though so i havn't let it sit for a weekend or longer.

EDIT: This weekend it drainded my battery. I needed a jump. I was running the computer for quite a long time though with the engine off so i don't think it was beasue of normal USB/serial drain

I use the ITPS and after 45 secs it cuts power to the mobo all together in case windows craps out during shutdown (as it often does) ... so it's not an issue for me.

I'd suggest doing something similar. have something cut power to the powersupply when the car's off (after a minute or so) so it won't drain any power

i am going to be using an OPUS .... so if i recall corectly that has a built in shutdown controller that should take care of the job.

And no there is nothing to disable it in the bios ... at least from what i can tell .... if you have an epia and no where it is .. i'd love to find out.

OK Here are a couple answers from experience on this matter -

1) There is no way to fix this problem in the BIOS or the serial port. I have confirmed this with VIA. The hardware seems to be incapable of this.

2) The opus 90W CAN cut all power to the motherboard when shut down, but the 150W CAN'T. IE if you use a 90W opus, you don't have to worry about this if you set it to cut all power.

3) The hub-hacking method caused (for me anyway) some very odd power problems. Sometimes when I'd plug in USB devices, the computer would reboot. It would reboot at random every hour or two on longer trips.

The solution for me was to cut the 5V lines inside the cable that attaches to the USB header on the motherboard and add some 5V reed relays that are triggered by the switched 5V line on a drive power cable. That way, power gets cut to two USB ports when the power is off, but when the computer is on, power is still supplied to the ports in the normal fashon. You can't do anything about the onboard ports, but if you need a few more ports you can add a USB hub normally to one of these two new battery-friendly usb ports...

Reed relays are a good choice for this because they are cheap, they only have a NO connection, and their maximum current rating of 500mA is the maximum spec for USB.

Here's a photo of the modified cable:

What in the heck is going on in that cable of yours.

And to correct you about the opus 90w: It does still apply power to USB and Serial Devices when it is switched off.

I could be wrong here and if so please tell me how to make it turn off all power (was that one of the jumpers?). I believe that i have it set to kill all power.