In my work trying to create devices that can install OSes from scratch on computers and flash phones and embedded IoT devices, I’m always looking for things that can support being both a usb host and a usb gadget.

Think about your phone, how it works to connect a micro-B to charge and connect to it as a gadget to your computer, then when you connect a micro-A cable you plug mice, keyboard, and thumb drives into your phone.

As a usb host, you can plug a mouse, keyboard, and pretty much anything you’d plug into your computer to it. Allowing you to do things like:

• Format a thumb drive or microSD card
• bootstrap embedded devices like intel edison
• flash a phone

As a usb gadget, you can plug the device into a computer and have it show up as a usb keyboard, disk, network, and other interesting things.

• show up as a network adapter
• provide a web / programming interface to the gadget without needing internet
• send some keystrokes a computer
• present a dynamic USB cdrom / dvd drive
• re-install a computer from scratch combining keyboard and drive support
• install OSes to a drive hosted on the device and snapshot them

I’m looking to see if we can’t get the new $5 RPi zero to function as both .