Raspberry Pi as flash drive with network access

[JakoobCZ]

Hi,
we are restoring old cutting machine at work and unfortunately it has only USB port, not ethernet. Therefore with each cutting plan our designer has to leave office, go across the factory and plug in the loaded flashdrive, cut the "products" and go back to office for another.

I'm wondering if there is a possibility for any Raspberry Pi model to act as USB flash drive with ability to be "loaded" over the network? Better said Raspberry Pi would act as a shared drive to network computers and in the same time as flashdrive to the embedded computer in the cutting machine.

I've tried to find the solution across many forums, but it seems to be quite unique and maybe impossible solution. I assume I'm looking for board with OTG support, therefore only Pi Zero is in the game, but there is no network interface and only one of the USB ports can data connection

Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated

Thanks
Jakoob

[ghans]

There are SPI erhernet and WiFi chips which you could
use with the Zero. I'd expect "Caps" for this purpose will
appear sooner or later.


ghans

[stderr]

Hi,
we are restoring old cutting machine at work and unfortunately it has only USB port, not ethernet. Therefore with each cutting plan our designer has to leave office, go across the factory and plug in the loaded flashdrive, cut the "products" and go back to office for another.

I'm wondering if there is a possibility for any Raspberry Pi model to act as USB flash drive with ability to be "loaded" over the network?

If you've really got someone having to walk back to an office for every update, I would first get the pi working at the cutting device just to avoid the walk. You could dream up a lot of cool things but just making it so they don't have to walk would seem huge. Obviously make sure that when removing and putting the USB back in, the systems are properly synced to avoid any data corruption.

[JakoobCZ]

If you've really got someone having to walk back to an office for every update, I would first get the pi working at the cutting device just to avoid the walk. You could dream up a lot of cool things but just making it so they don't have to walk would seem huge. Obviously make sure that when removing and putting the USB back in, the systems are properly synced to avoid any data corruption.

Unfortunately, it is about 250 m away and you need to put protective equipment on you each time you visit (S3 boots, vest, gloves, helmet, glasses), very often there are corrections to cutting plans and we aren't able to plan ahead since our production isn't in series, it is rather unique. So it will be for sure few kilometers per day. For the designer this will be waste of valuable time and operator can't leave, because he needs to check if it operates correctly.

I know I'm trying to do something "specialized" with HW created for developers, but I like the challenge If I can't create "network flash drive" I will go for PI with touchscreen connected on the network and mounted to the machine, so the operator will copy data to flashdrive and plug it to the machine.

[ghans]

You will propably not be able to write to the emulated drive
directly over ethernet. You will have to unmount , transfer ,
remount or bad things™ are bound to happen.

Look here for a Pi Zero Ethernet "Cap" :
viewtopic.php?t=127522

A WiFi solution :
http://hackaday.io/project/8678-rpi-wifi

Both solutions are slower than anything over USB.

ghans