I'm quite new to this kind of things, but I've jumped out with an idea of a device to give the ability to mount network shares as they where normal pendrives (like for TVs and other old devices).
I started gathering information about it and thought a RPi Zero was a good starting point, since it has USB-OTG.
OS side there should be no problems: according to these sources I can easily mount the network share on the Pi and so on the USB (OTG device mode).
- RPi to emulate a USB mass storage device? - Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange
- How to share a folder as an USB mass storage device (from a raspberry pi) - Super User
And now it comes the difficult part.
From what I've read (but I might be wrong) USB-OTG has two operation modes: host, the classic one, and device, that allows it to be seen as an external device. I've also read that only A models (I'm sure of that about RPi Zero) support OTG, while others don't since they use USB HUBs that put the port only in host mode.
So, the question is: how do I get both network (WiFi) and USB-OTG functionality working on the RPi Zero?
Google shows a couple of suggestions (sorry, can't post more links):
- WiFi through ESP8266 for Raspberry Pi Zero - Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange but is seems to be very slow and unstable (~ 1 Mbps, definitely to slow to stream a whatever compressed video from a NAS, in case of a TV).
- RPi WiFi - Fast RPi WiFi without USB that looks very promising even if quite difficult to follow.
- SHABPi WiFi & SD Card Slot for Pi Zero based on 3 that, as suggested in the RPi forums (/forums/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=137710), can get up to 40 Mbps, pretty cool! But where can I get it?
- RPi Zero IoT HAT, but I cannot find any info about the speed despite image available in the Github page and I'm quite skeptical they can get 72 Mbps out of a GPIO connection.
Thank you for any help and/or clarification you can give me, I hope one day I'll be able to answer any of the questions asked here!
