Small USB hubs

Description

This project is aimed at making a database of small and cheap USB hubs which are ideal for embedding into devices and leaving them there. For example, it's useful for making a device around a devboard which only has one or two ports, such as Raspberry Pi A/A+/Zero, VoCore, BeagleBone or similar. It also is useful when you want to stuff a lot of USB peripherals into a device but can't really afford to connect each of them with a separate cable.

Details

Sometimes size is crucial. If you need a hub for your workdesk, you can pick almost any of them and size is hardly the most important part - price and count of ports are more imortant. However, if you're going to embed a USB hub into something small, like a tiny wearable device with Raspberry Pi Zero at its heart, size starts to matter. Many of the USB hubs are essentially PCBs with a USB hub chip and long traces just to make the board the size of the enclosure, which is huge.
You could roll your own PCB and slap a USB hub chip on it. However, you need to make all the USB traces and layout right just to make sure it won't be laggy, and AFAIK this is not so easy, especially if you dont have much experience with making two-sided boards at home. There are USB hub boards sold by some Chinese vendors on eBay and such, but they're huge and don't really have any benefits over a hub, not even in price.
Also, buying a hub is cheaper and faster anyway, and if you're not planning to sell a lot of the devices you're making, a hub that was built by somebody else is perfectly suitable for your application. With that in mind, I'll describe a couple of hubs I've got and I've worked with.
If you have your own experience, do send a request to contribute and add your project logs =)
TODO:

Current measurements
dmesg output
lsusb output

Project Logs

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Esperanza EA135B 4-port USB 2.0
Arya • 02/19/2016 at 23:17 • 0 comments

This one has a tad bigger PCB, but shares the same connector layout as the Sweex US012 one, so all the pros and cons apply. It even has the same type of USB plug as Sweex one. It looks like this:
Tested with raspberry Pi, worked. The board has nothing to cut from it, though, so you can't make it smaller than it is. It's based on FET1.1s, which seems to be quite popular nowadays.
On the photo it's shown embedded in one device I'm developing for a friend, proving 2 external USB ports for the devices that he'll connect to a AR9331 board which only has one port. It seems to be stable, too - I'll edit this log after some testing.
Sweex US012 4-port hub
Arya • 02/19/2016 at 22:52 • 0 comments
This is a really, really small hub. Even if you're not going to tear it down and cut the PCB like I usually do, just throw it in your backpack and use when necessary - you don't even need to carry the cable. It also doesn't have any problems with big USB devices (3G modems/flash drives) blocking adjacent ports - each port has its own side.
- Based on GL850G
- 4mA power consumption when not doing anything (and with a small LED) - ask me if you need more detailed measurements
You can just disassemble it, desolder the USB ports, cut the board a bit and it's going to fit almost anywhere (board on pics is already cut). It should be easy to cut it using anything you typically would use to cut PCBs. There's only one problem - a 5V trace connecting all the USB VBUS pins goes around the chip, so it's not as small as it could have been. Anyway, this hub's board when cut to the smallest size possible is around 1"x1", and it seems to be working good with a Raspberry Pi. The price should be about 5$, and I'd recommend to buy 1 or 2 more just to have a USB hub at hand. Beware though - the connection cord breaks easily when under stress and hub stops working, that was in fact my reason to disassemble and repurpose it.