Relay Board for Relaying USB Signals

[baggyg]

Hi,

I am a beginner on Raspberry Pi but quickly learning what an awesome and versatile device it can be.

I am working on a project whereby I would like to plug a USB device into the raspberry pi 3, identify the device and have the ability to relay the USB signals through a relay board to my main PC (with the ability to turn the device on and off via code).

Can anyone suggest a relay board up to the task? I am a programmer and not too experienced with soldering etc, so ideally a pre-made board would be best.

Also please let me know if this sounds like something that is by nature inachievable.

Thanks in advance.

[pcmanbob]

Hi

Your post is some what confusing.

not sure exactly what you are after?

So do you want a board with physical relays on it that connects to a USB port
or
do you just want to send USB data between your pi and the PC

[baggyg]

Hi,

Sorry about that, maybe I have the architecture confused.

Basically I want to connect a USB device such as USB Storage Key to the Raspberry Pi. I want to enumerate and do some actions on that device (I.e. scan for contents / certain file name). Once I have done that I want the USB device to act is if it is connected to the main computer.

My theory was to connect a relay board to the raspberry pi and once I have run my checks (via python) relay all USB traffic between the device and my main computer. Therefore my main computer will always be connected to the USB relay but only receive device data once I have checked it.

[pcmanbob]

I have never seen a USB device that can act as a flash drive and allow communication between two master devices. Both the pi and your pc will be master devices.
You can get special cables for copying files over usb from pc to pc, I have only ever seen them for Windows PC's but that does not mean they will not work on Linux of course.

[baggyg]

I suppose the way I saw it was that upon initially connecting the device to the Pi, it would be a standard connection. After I had successfully checked it and activated a relay switch the device would then function as a hub. Switching the relay off would then stop the connection to the main computer.

[pcmanbob]

As I said never seen a device that can do both.

does it have to be over usb ?

if you can use normal networking you could share a folder on the pc, have the pi connect to it then you can do your checks on the pi and just copy paste the file in to the shared folder on the pc.

you may be able to do some thing similar using the USB to USB cable I mentioned if you can find one that works on both windows and Linux.