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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).

  1. RPi to emulate a USB mass storage device? - Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange
  2. 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):

  1. 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).
  2. RPi WiFi - Fast RPi WiFi without USB that looks very promising even if quite difficult to follow.
  3. 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?
  4. 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!

Samuele Pilleri
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    "I'm quite skeptical they can get 72 Mbps out of a GPIO connection" -> I am too, but the same logic applies to the SHABPi board, which uses SPI, and to be fair that's documented in theory as working up to 125 MHz. WRT to the SHABPi I think you have to build it yourself: https://hackaday.io/project/10097-shabpi-wifi-sd-card-slot-for-pi-zero – goldilocks Nov 02 '16 at 18:45
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    Worth a look: https://oshlab.com/esp8266-raspberry-pi-gpio-wifi/ ...I found a link to that in this answer. "GPIO0/ID_SC" is physical pin 27; here's a chart of the various alt functions. Probably much easier than the SHABPi; there's a link to similar hackaday page on the oshlab one: RPi WiFi. – goldilocks Nov 02 '16 at 20:02
  • Thank you very much @goldilocks for your hints, I'm sure they will help not only me, but also many other people since this seems to be a quite spread topic (especially with RPi Zero). – Samuele Pilleri Nov 02 '16 at 22:49
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    I know this is quite old, but this may be related: https://superuser.com/questions/215466/make-nas-appear-as-a-usb-drive/1613829#1613829 - the newer Raspberry Pi SBCs may have USB OTG and Wi-Fi, especially the Pi Zero W. See other hardware referenced in this answer. – Matthias W. Dec 31 '20 at 12:58

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