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USB/IP Project

usbip.sourceforge.net

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Re: USB/IP Project

#41

Post by DiabloD3 »

wyldfire wrote: post #38
DiabloD3 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want a USB NIC, though, I want just USB to USB with as little shit in between them as possible to be as cheap as possible. Maybe even allow straight DMA to DMA across the machines due to it being USB 3.x.

Thunderbolt is much closer to the PCIe bridge/RDMA style interface you seek. Not as ubiquitous or cheap as USB, though.

Yeah, that's 100% of the problem.

Intel refuses to deploy Thunderbolt everywhere, even though I have two Z87/Z97 motherboards with Intel GPU-powered DisplayPort ports and Intel could have trivially baked this into their chipset.

The only computer I have Thunderbolt on? My MBPr. The only computer I don't need a shitton of cheap bandwidth on? My MBPr.

Re: USB/IP Project

#42

Post by wtallis »

roel_v wrote: post #35
wtallis wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a third of that price, you can get a box that's also got a built-in ethernet switch and two WiFi interfaces. You're paying a ton for software convenience.

What, a Raspberry Pi (which for that price doesn't have ethernet, wifi or a case for that matter), and on which I'll have to wait 5 minutes before the OCR is done that my central server takes 10 seconds to do; and which requires Windows 10 which didn't even exist when I first got my setup 2-3 years ago?

Hell no. Just get any wireless router from the past 3-4 years and you've got USB and fast networking on a cheap box, and you can install a print server or usbip server depending on your preferences. That $150 box is probably even using the same 800MHz MIPS SoC as the $50 routers.

(And what are you getting at with implying that using a RasPi instead of a turnkey solution would cause Windows-related trouble or require doing the heavy processing somewhere else than your current setup?)

Re: USB/IP Project

#43

Post by tbronchain »

This gave me the idea to use my Raspberry pi as a remote hub for Keyboard/Mouse.

Unfortunately, it seems it can't make it working, whether I use the official apt-get binaries, or try to compile myself[1] (either with the version available on sourceforge, or in the linux kernel src).

Anyone who succeed to make this running on Raspberry Pi (Raspbian)? It would be a perfect application!

[1]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=1077...

Re: USB/IP Project

#44

Post by voltagex_ »

I wish I had a million bucks to donate to this project. It could be great, but it's languishing unmaintained on SourceForge.

Side note, can someone please buy me a code-signing certificate?

Re: USB/IP Project

#45

Post by cpach »

kenz0r wrote: post #18
pg_is_a_butt wrote: post #7

seems the network latency would break the realtime expectations of high data rate USB 3.0 hardware on the USB bus. and using a still image from a webcam seems like the worst use case... there are much better protocols for serving video streams.

One of the more compelling use-cases for USB over IP is connecting proprietary licensing dongles to virtual machines.

Are those still commonly used?

Re: USB/IP Project

#46

Post by xezpeleta »

roel_v wrote: post #10

Just buy one of these: http://www.amazon.com/Silex-SX-DS-4000U2-Print-Server-800MHz... . Works awesome, lets you buy the cheap non-workgroup version of pretty much everything (printer, scanner, label printer, ...) and still hook it up to a central server. I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500 hooked up this way, which scans directly to Dropbox. Put the scanner anywhere where it's convenient to access, put paper in it, pres…

You can do the same with a RaspberryPi:

http://vmwarebits.com/content/virtualhere-raspberry-pi-usb-s...

Re: USB/IP Project

#47

Post by plorg »

wyldfire wrote: post #37
roel_v wrote: post #10

Just buy one of these: http://www.amazon.com/Silex-SX-DS-4000U2-Print-Server-800MHz... . Works awesome, lets you buy the cheap non-workgroup version of pretty much everything (printer, scanner, label printer, ...) and still hook it up to a central server. I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500 hooked up this way, which scans directly to Dropbox. Put the scanner anywhere where it's convenient to access, put paper in it, pres…

I bought one of these: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005GM1Q1O/?&tag=bcgpfeed-2... It's dirt cheap ($10-20), easy to load linux on [1], and it can be a simple file server, it can run minidlna, google cloud print [2], all kinds of stuff. 800MHz is not a screamer, but most simple I/O tasks like A/V streaming and printing are a walk in the park. [1] http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv5/pogoplug-series-4 [2] http:…

Similarly, I found a used pogoplug at a thrift shop with a $5 sticker on it. I bought it knowing little about it but suspecting it could be hacked. At the checkout they told me the sticker color indicated it was half off, so it cost me less than $3.

With the shipping software the pogoplugs are usually useless secondhand, as the web interface is hidden if you haven't registered the device with the company (and it can't be de-authed without the original owner's credentials). But the administrative interface is still available, if you know the path. Dropbear is already installed, so you can just start it, log in, overwrite the bootloader[0] and run one of several Linux distributions from a flash drive (I use Debian[1]).

My unit[2] has a 700 MHz dual-ARMv6. It only has 256MB of built-in RAM, but it's simple to allocate 1GB of the OS flash drive as swap.

Last year I picked up a number of old MIDI keyboards a local college was throwing out. I figured they were just old and the college had replaced them with something newer, but they worked fine for me under Linux. So I offered one of them to my brother, and he couldn't get it to work under Windows. Of course, it turns out the device is 15 years old and never had a 64-bit driver. So I've been experimenting with using the Python midistream package to stream MIDI over ethernet to a Windows host. Unfortunately, the package (since subsumed by a project called scenic[3]) hasn't had a new release since 2012. But it still works, and it makes for a pretty fun hack.

[0] http://projects.doozan.com/uboot/

[1] http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,16044

[2] https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B004TDY924

Re: USB/IP Project

#48

Post by TD-Linux »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #19

I've got a couple of the Chinese made "Remote USB" servers which are interesting but not as compatible as I would like. What I find really amusing is that back when USB was proposed I argued that rather than create an entirely new infrastructure why not just use Ethernet packets. There are additional protocol types available in the bit encoding and all sorts of infrastructure that already supported layer 2 switching.…

The Ethernet phy is actually pretty expensive, especially compared to USB 1.0. The isolation transformers alone are $1. Of course you could skip the isolation like some backplanes do.

The ID assignment for USB is pretty awful and so is the robustness - for larger products it seems Ethernet is on the rise again.

Re: USB/IP Project

#49

Post by spin »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #19

I've got a couple of the Chinese made "Remote USB" servers which are interesting but not as compatible as I would like. What I find really amusing is that back when USB was proposed I argued that rather than create an entirely new infrastructure why not just use Ethernet packets. There are additional protocol types available in the bit encoding and all sorts of infrastructure that already supported layer 2 switching.…

I feel the same way (that ethernet is a perfectly good way of moving data around), so I created this a while back as a side project:

  https://github.com/mfassler/eFirmata
Basically, I wanted USB, but I wanted much longer cable-lengths than USB, so I used ethernet.
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