Anyone tried accessing the OT in USB disk mode from a Raspberry Pi?

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#1

I’ve got my Octatrack in a semi-permanent live setup across the room from my desktop, so any time I need to transfer files I have to get the laptop, connect the OT, transfer the files to the laptop, and then transfer them from the laptop to the desktop, either over LAN or on a USB stick. There’s no convenient place to actually put the laptop near the OT so it’s just generally cumbersome.

I was thinking that a Raspberry Pi Zero W with a Waveshare USB Hub Hat running headless would let me access the OT in disk mode over wifi via SSH, but I don’t feel like spending $25 and the time to set it all up if it’s already known that the Octatrack isn’t going to actually work properly with it.

Anyone have any firsthand experience doing anything like this?

EDIT: depending on how manageable network latency was, you could theoretically also connect a basic USB MIDI interface like the Roland UM-ONE and be able to connect the OT’s MIDI ports to your DAW with a wireless ipMIDI connection too, if you wanted to do that.

#2

Just can say it worked with an iPhone, camera kit.

3 Likes
#3

A USB CF card reader is another option. Just carry the card to the computer, instead of the whole OT.

Careful putting the card back in tho, people have made reports of bent pins from insufficiently careful reinsertion.

fwiw, I would be shocked if Rasp PI had any trouble mounting OT as disk over USB, so if you do go that way expect it to work.

#4

I mean raspbian is debian based.

I run Ubuntu on my laptop (Debian based) and it works just fine.

Haven’t tried accessing it over the net headless or anything but it should show up.

I guess you could just scp the files.

I haven’t tried this but it should work however as usual YMMV :joy:

I have thought of something similar (rsync from desktop to rpi and then just load in USB disk mode on OT)

1 Like
#5

I wouldn’t expect it to be an issue, but you never know.

#6

There is no reason at all any linux system wouldn’t be able to mount the OT in disk mode (Mac users are always reporting problems, but I’ve never had an issue from linux).

You’d need to make sure you unmount the device on the Pi before exiting disk mode on the OT. You can use a udev rule to automount it when the OT is put into disk mode.

#7

Oh yeah, I forgot how much of a problem it can be if an external disk doesn’t mount or unmount correctly under Raspbian in particular (for whatever reason I’ve never had problems with other Linux flavors, but with Raspbian I’ve had pretty routine problems with thumb drives.

The main thing to me is whether the Pi Zero using USB OTG would be an issue, but I don’t expect it would be an issue. The OS shouldn’t have any problem, and the hardware theoretically shouldn’t but again I figured it would be worth asking. I’m not sure if the hats that use the header instead of the test pads on the main board are also USB OTG so it might not even be relevant since I’d be going for a header connected one either way.

Kind of moot though, since I just had a bunch of parts stolen from the mail this weekend and I don’t know if Mouser will replace them or not, so I might not be doing any unnecessary buying for a while.

#8

If you do go with the pi, you could just use a compatible USB hub and control it with VNC from the laptop, you just have to ssh in to start the Vnc server on the pi :slight_smile:

#9

Yeah, I’m assuming the hat I’ve got in mind is a standard hub (like the hub built in to the Pi3). Using an external hub complicates it enough that at that point I’d rather do what I do now (which is already more convenient than taking the card out, finding a CF reader, plugging it in, etc; the only CF readers I have handy are stored in the cases with the MPC and SP-303, since I rarely need them for anything else). A Pi Zero mounted underneath the Octatrack stand, USB power supply, and USB cable are the limit before it would go from convenient to cumbersome.