I'm running virtualhere on thousands of raspberry pi's sharing various USB devices to cloud machines over vpn. It's been working without issues for years now. Seems to be a solo developer in Australia that's been working on it for a really long time. https://www.virtualhere.com/
Thanks for your work. I tried using it to use the official Gamecube Controller USB Adapter through Steam Link, but there was some spiking noise that killed playability. Nevertheless, I think it is amazing stuff.
This sounds like a cool use case for my observatory control box. Do you ever have issues with latency pushing the bounds of the USB spec wrt latency? Can I use this with my camera?
I have a lot of astro users. But you need to use Ethernet for the connection between VirtualHere server and client and not wifi. A pi5 is very good for this.
The reality is that licenses must be restricted because people cheat, steal and pirate. Hate them instead. Besides $49 is dirt-cheap for what it is, especially considering it covers all future versions.
> This USB server solution is perfect for allowing USB devices to be used remotely over a LAN network, over the Internet, or in the Cloud without the USB device needing to be physically attached to remote client machine.
> Possibly because a developer hired to write something around usbip would cost a lot less. https://usbip.sourceforge.net/
Would it? For the sake of discussion, I'll assume "thousands of raspberry pi's" = 2,000 RBpis, or something around $10,000 in license fees.
I don't know anything about either project beyond the links shared by you and the root comment, but based on the information at each link and the assumption of $10,000 spend:
I would choose the one time cost of VirtualHere's purpetual update license and release cadence over a some short dev for hire contract to write some unmaintained wrapper code around a sourceforge library that hasn't been been touched in over a decade.
$49 times 2,000 is $98,000, not around $10,000. Yet your argument still holds. There are many reasons for that.
1. You are paying a developer that works 100% on that, year after year, and not a hire that won't be there when something goes wrong in the future after an OS update, new hardware, anything. This is basically your argument. Let me add:
2. In some parts of the world far away from SV but still in the West, $100k are about two years of gross developer salary, not what the developer actually gets at the end of the month. Point 1 still holds. Where it's 10 years of salary maybe companies could be tempted by a custom solution.
3. You are giving $49 per server to that developer but you are probably getting more per server from your customers. If you have thousands of servers you probably have a viable business, so that's just yet another cost of doing business.
usbip has made me angry for 5 years now, there is supposedly an open source windows client, but you have to put windows into some unsafe bullshit mode to be able to use unsigned drivers??
So you have to compromise your entire system to use one program
I mean you could sign it yourself. Or donate to a maintainer so they can sign it. Open source or other community windows drivers usually aren’t signed unless they have donors paying for it, certs aren’t free :)
If anything it’s on windows for not having a way to allow just one unsigned driver.
