Of all of my projects, this one is probably going to be one of the easier ones. This project is a little more open ended, but all you really need is the following:

Raspberry Pi Zero W (Adafruit)

Raspberry Pi Zero Case (this one or this one, for example)

Micro USB Data Cable (not a charge-only cable) (Amazon)

The challenge for many of us that we’re not always at our test bench, and making Pi equipment portable gets bulky really fast. If you’re using a regular Raspberry Pi, you need a Pi, an enclosure, a power adapter, and a wireless network to join- just as an example.

Where this gets complicated is if you’re in a spot where wireless is expensive (like an airport) or tightly regulated (like your work or school). An easy workaround is to turn on tethering on your mobile phone, but running your PC’s internet through tethering gets expensive, and fast.

The fix is actually pretty simple, and uses some common approaches well documented already- but in a typical weekend project, we’ll pull a few articles together to get you this project.

As you can see there’s only a few things to do- enable networking over the USB port, and configure the wireless interface. There are already how-to’s for different PC/Mac platforms, but this guide covers all of them in a single approach.

First, what we need to do is enable the USB Gadget support on the Raspberry Pi Zero W. This will let the Raspberry Pi turn the USB data port into an Ethernet USB adapter. It’s pretty easy. Run the following command:

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

And add the following lines to the end- the # sign allows us to place a comment so we can leave a note for ourselves later.

#added for USB gadget support

dtoverlay=dwc2

Next, we need to modify another boot file, go ahead and run

sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt

and add this specifically to the end of the line:

modules-load=dwc2,g_ether

It will look something like this: