I guess it's time to update the tutorial on making a WiFi-enabled USB stick, since it got dismissed as "kind of old."* (It's not "old." If it works, don't fix it!)

If you're not familiar with it: it's a tiny single-board computer. Plugged into a USB slot, it looks like a memory stick. But to the wifi network, it looks like a mountable directory. Long story short: you mount the directory on your PC, drag embroidery files into it, and to the embroidery machine it looks like you unplugged it and plugged it back in with new files. The Pi works so much better than the tetchy internal connections that I've never bothered to use the built-in networking on my newest machine. If you've battled getting your machine onto the network (and keeping it there), consider just using the USB port!

I hit up Micro Center last month, and snagged another Pi Zero and a few more microSD cards so I could set up one for Bonus Kid, who has more or less taken ownership of the smaller Janome. His is on the version currently in the tutorial page, and I really need to upgrade it to the version I use. (So, okay, that page is a little old.)

See, the embroidery machine - or a computer, or anything else - assumes it has sole access to the USB drive, and doesn't bother setting or checking for file locks. Some embroidery machines don't write to the drive, others do. If you happen to write to it at the same time the embroidery machine does, it can garble the file. That's why there's the newusb utility - sometimes you just gotta wipe the thing out and re-create it.

The newer version that I haven't gotten around to cleaning up and publishing is a little smarter: instead of sharing the files both as USB and as network directory, it has two copies. When you write to the network directory one, it shuts off the USB one and duplicates the network directory. It can still corrupt the USB version, if the embroidery machine was in the middle of writing to it when it was "unplugged," but there's always the network copy so newusb can recreate it without losing your files. (You should never have your only copy of a file on a USB stick, but even if you have permanent copies elsewhere it can be a nuisance to remember what all you had queued up to stitch out.)

While I'm updating that, I'm also going to give it a little web front-end, so you don't have to ssh in to run the little utilities anymore. Just a little less nerdy all around. But in the meantime? That "old" version still works. You just download and install the image, edit one file to tell it your wifi info, and you're good to go.

If you want to bring it up to the current-version (no web front-end yet, but you won't lose your files with a newusb), I wrote the instructions on that: Updating the watchdog.

---

• It got dismissed as such by someone who then used it to make a YouTube video. At least he linked here, though he kinda made it sound like he solved all those problems himself instead of just going through this page. I don't know why YouTubers are like that. You made a whole video, that's a lot of work! You can still be proud of that without making it look like you did it all by yourself.