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I need to connect a typical USB SiK radio to a USB client.

The other radio is plugged into a PC so is not a problem. But I don't have a Host device for the other end, and while I can provide +5 power, obviously I need something (ideally a single chip or very small solution) to act as a Host, so that the radio can communicate with the USB client device.

I suppose an Arduino could be programmed for this but I'm looking for a way to solve this more elegantly.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ So you need a host (with two ports) and software to bridge the two. I suggest a raspberry pi. And besides this, it looks like a shopping question. Those are considered off-topic. \$\endgroup\$
    – Jeroen3
    Commented Mar 21, 2020 at 20:50
  • \$\begingroup\$ whatever a "SiK radio" is! Anyways, removing the shopping question so that we don't have to close this. \$\endgroup\$
    – Marcus Müller
    Commented Mar 21, 2020 at 21:11
  • \$\begingroup\$ Silicon potassium radio? I think you should say what a SiK radio is. \$\endgroup\$
    – Hearth
    Commented Mar 21, 2020 at 21:33
  • \$\begingroup\$ I didn't really consider this to be a "shopping" question since I doubted that there would be an off the shelf solution. In any case, SiK radios are common inexpensive 433 or 915mhz telemetry radios. E.g.: store.mrobotics.io/mRo-SiK-Telemetry-Radio-V2-915Mhz-p/… \$\endgroup\$
    – E000TG
    Commented Mar 21, 2020 at 23:36
  • \$\begingroup\$ From providing a +5V to having a USB host is a VERY big distance...Honestly, being a sort of USB person, this kind of questions feels pretty insulting. \$\endgroup\$
    – Ale..chenski
    Commented Mar 22, 2020 at 0:18

2 Answers 2

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Arduino doesn't sound like the platform of choice here, but you're clearly on the right path:

You're looking for a platform that makes it easy to configure your controller's USB interface as host.

An easy solution would be a fully blown application processor board – an Odroid, a raspberry Pi, or a lot of other Linux boards would be as easy as it gets to set this up.

On the lower-power, less comfortable scale of things would be microcontroller with native USB support, together with a somewhat sensible OS for these that makes USB handling easy. Your application sounds a lot like ARM's mbed platform's target use case, so I'd start there – they have a whole galery of supported devices, starting from USD 5 eval boards to fully blown ARM computers.

Personally, that would be something you can hack together with nothing but a QFN breakout board and a Cypress PSoC4 running ChibiOS, but honestly, that's pretty far from beginner-friendly.

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I'll be solving this with a Raspberry Pi Zero W. This will provide the USB OTG master I need to talk to the client device, and I can use the Zero W's onboard Wi-Fi for now instead of the telemetry radios. If I want to add the radios later, it will be easy, since I have compatible versions that could connect to the Zero W's serial interface. Thanks all!

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