So I’ve been playing with the raspberry pi again lately and once again have got frustrated with the USB ports. Thus, i decided it was about time I looked into sorting them.

I wanted to add a capacitor to the USB ports to allow better hot-plugging of devices as the issues is well documented everywhere.

I decided I think the USB ports only support 200mA per port but when using a USB webcam and wifi adapter I was having difficulty with the power draw as the camera would often disappear from the device.

I decided to bridge power directly from the microUSB power input in order to provide the RaspberryPi with more power on the USB ports.

I decided the easiest place to take the power from was the fuse(F3) and diode(D17) at the top of the board shown here:
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And wire them directly into the USB positive(+) and negative(-) pins for the USB headers:
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This works perfectly and I no longer have devices periodically lost or random reboots 🙂

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