Electronic – What’s needed to get 100 mA from a USB port

powerpower supplyusb

I'm trying to build a stereo speaker system for use on a laptop. I want to keep it as simple as possible, so I'm thinking of using laptop's audio output to for the audio signal and a USB port for power.

As far as I know, each port should be able to provide 100 mA for devices. Is there any need to signal to the computer that I'm going to try to draw 100 mA, or is it acceptable to just connect the device?

Also, how stabilized and filtered is USB power? I'm thinking of using TDA7053A to drive the speakers and its minimum voltage is 4.5 V. If that doesn't work, I'd use two TDA7052 amplifiers, but I'd like to keep number of parts as low as possible.

As for power consumption, I already have a small radio which uses one 50 Ω speaker and a TDA7052 and it uses at most 25 mA, so even with two of those speakers, I should have lots of power to spare with a maximum supply current of 100 mA.

Best Answer

I haven't experimented with USB power, but this analysis seems to point to it working just fine. At 100ma all tested devices remain above 4.5v. I believe you can just connect to the port... you can test this simply by plugging in a USB cable and checking the pins on the other end with a multimeter.

Here's the full USB spec and here's all other docs from usb.org