James Helman: Enable OTG Ethernet on Orange PI Zero 2w

For this I'll be using Armbian community as I much prefer it over the official OrangePI builds. With Armbian this is really very simple but I wasn't finding any recent guides so here we go.

WiFi is not needed for this configuration unless you want to use SSH. The minimal Armbian builds use netplan by default so if you need some help enabling WiFi see here

https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Networking/

Enable OTG Ethernet support

First we need to enable the USB host support

sudo armbian-config

Select "System"

Select "Kernel"

Select "SY210 - Manage device tree overlays"

Select "sun50i-h5-usbhost0", you can select all the usbhosts if you want

Save and reboot when prompted

After the reboot lets try enabling the kernel module for the interface

sudo modprobe g_ether
dmesg | grep "HOST"

If it worked you should something like this from the dmesg command

As long as "g_ether" started up we can enable it to automatically startup by adding it to /etc/modules

sudo nano /etc/modules

Just add "g_ether" ad the end of what ever is already there. ctrl+o to save and ctrl+x to exit

Lets reboot again to make sure it loads

After the reboot you can check on it again with dmesg or ip addr

dmesg | grep "HOST"

ip addr

Configure Interface

Now lets give it an IP address using the example from https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Networking/

I recommend remarking out the "routes" section, having a default route here will cause issues if you are using the WiFi interface for network/Internet access.

sudo nano /etc/netplan/20-static-ip.yaml

network:
version: 2
renderer: networkd
ethernets:
usb0: # Change this to your ethernet interface
addresses:
- 192.168.1.199/24
#routes:
#- to: default
#via: 192.168.1.1
nameservers:
addresses:
- 9.9.9.9
- 1.1.1.1

Make sure you change the interface if yours is not usb0 and set the address, default route and nameservers appropriately for your environment. Save and exit.

Apply netplan changes

If the file is new we need to update the permissions or netplan will yell at us

sudo chmod 600 /etc/netplan/20-static-ip.yaml

Now apply

sudo netplan apply

Now if we list our IP's we should have something on our usb interface

ip addr

Before we had

Now we should have something like this but with your settings

Windows

If you plugin your device to Windows it may not work, the driver needed is not standard. So it my show up as a new serial port. That is fine we just need to install a driver.