Help with USB Direct

[clee604]

I'm looking to get some help getting a single cable USB Direct connection to work.

I've been trying to follow the guide here:
https://github.com/gtxaspec/wz_mini_hacks/blob/master/documentation/usb-direct.md

However I think I'm lacking the knowledge around the different types of networking configs (interfaces, dhcpcd.conf, systemd-networkd) with different distros of Linux. I'm using Linux Mint on a x64 and I see there's a /etc/network/interfaces but no dnsmasq.conf on the PC host. Are there there dependencies I need to install? When I turn on USB-Direct, the camera still connects by wifi and I see the usb0 is in a DOWN state.

Any help or guidance on what I should read up on is greatly appreciated.

[virmaior]

if the camera is still connecting with wifi, what's your wz_mini.conf look like, specifically are you using bonding or something like that?

here's my base config on my cameras:

#####NETWORKING#####
CUSTOM_HOSTNAME="WCV3Z1"

ENABLE_USB_ETH="false"
ENABLE_USB_ETH_MODULE_AUTODETECT="true"
ENABLE_USB_ETH_MODULE_MANUAL=""

ENABLE_USB_DIRECT="true"
USB_DIRECT_MAC_ADDR="02:FF:FF:FF:FF:01"

ENABLE_USB_RNDIS="false"

...

ENABLE_RTL8189FS_DRIVER="true"
ENABLE_ATBM603X_DRIVER="true"

##### NETWORK INTERFACE BONDING #####
BONDING_ENABLED="false"
BONDING_PRIMARY_INTERFACE="eth0"
BONDING_SECONDARY_INTERFACE="wlan0"
BONDING_LINK_MONITORING_FREQ_MS="100"                                           
BONDING_DOWN_DELAY_MS="5000"
BONDING_UP_DELAY_MS="5000"

basically the only variation is the USB_DIRECT_MAC_ADDR="02:FF:FF:FF:FF:01"

with that config, the camera should be set for usb direct.
If bonding is on, then if it fails to get a good connection it might be falling back to wifi.

just to emphasize because this was an immensely annoying problem the usb mini to A cable that comes with the wyze camera does not support data, so it won't work. (I had a bunch of other mini to A cables lying around and only 1 worked - so I bought a bunch).

Assuming the camera is correctly configured, then it should show up in ifconfig as a new interface called usb0. (I had one incident where I'd misconfigured and it was showing up as eth1).

on my RPI,
I also get messages like when plugging in a camera in tail /var/log/messages or dmesg:

Jul 31 07:43:05 mulberrypi kernel: [1033891.956931] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): usb0: link becomes ready
Jul 31 07:43:05 mulberrypi kernel: [1033891.957045] br0: port 1(usb0) entered blocking state
Jul 31 07:43:05 mulberrypi kernel: [1033891.957053] br0: port 1(usb0) entered forwarding state
Jul 31 07:43:40 mulberrypi kernel: [1033926.733938] usb 1-1.2.1.4: new high-speed USB device number 28 using xhci_hcd
Jul 31 07:43:40 mulberrypi kernel: [1033926.875041] usb 1-1.2.1.4: New USB device found, idVendor=0525, idProduct=a4a1, bcdDevice= 3.10
Jul 31 07:43:40 mulberrypi kernel: [1033926.875064] usb 1-1.2.1.4: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
Jul 31 07:43:40 mulberrypi kernel: [1033926.875082] usb 1-1.2.1.4: Product: NCM Gadget
Jul 31 07:43:40 mulberrypi kernel: [1033926.875099] usb 1-1.2.1.4: Manufacturer: wz_mini_ncm
Jul 31 07:43:40 mulberrypi kernel: [1033926.905907] cdc_ncm 1-1.2.1.4:1.0: MAC-Address: 02:b1:ef:a3:72:b2
Jul 31 07:43:40 mulberrypi kernel: [1033926.906937] cdc_ncm 1-1.2.1.4:1.0 usb5: register 'cdc_ncm' at usb-0000:01:00.0-1.2.1.4, CDC NCM, 02:b1:ef:a3:72:b2

Without doing any settings on your linux system, the ip address should be a random private assign ip. **That IP address is for the linux computer -- not the usb direct camera **, because each usb camera sets up a small network.

---

To recap:

1. please share the relevant parts of wz_mini.conf
2. for testing purposes, let's start without bonding
3. insure that your cable is a data cable
4. see if a new interface shows up in ifconfig when you plug it in (can also confirm with dmesg)

[clee604]

Thanks for the detailed reply, I spent some time trying to get it to work last night and made a bit of progress but to answer your questions:

1. I'm basically using the wz_conf as specified in your template guide: usb_direct = true, bonding, eth, rdis false. I updated the MAC address as per your recommendation as well.
2. I was going to turn bonding (wifi) on after I got it working as you mentioned, it is currently off
3. This is what I finally made progress on last night, I also had to go through a drawer full of cables but I found one that has data now
4. Here is where I made progress after the data cable, but it also deviates from your guide:

The interface name for some reason is enx025a4bb25708 instead of usb0.

By default (no changes to any networking config) Linux Mint, the camera can't get any IP (internal or not). I'm using Linux Mint XFCE so there is a UI, there is a new 'Wired Connection 2' which corresponds to this new interface, if I update the network setting there to "Shared with other computers" then the cam gets an IP of 10.42.0.1 and the camera is accessible by the Wyze app.

However it isn't accessible from the local network outside of the Linux Mint PC as it doesn't have an IP from the router. I'd like for the Wyze cam to get an IP from the router via DHCP on the same subnet (ie. 192.168.1.xxx). I'm assuming I need to set up some kind of bridge but here is where I got stuck. Alternatively if it's easier, I can set up a static IP, but I rather set the static IP at the router level if possible.

In short I'm able to get the camera to access internet now (Wyze Cam App works fine), but it doesn't pull an IP from the router (my DHCP server) so it isn't accessible via internal network (ie. RTSP via TinyCam).

[virmaior]

I. In terms of USB direct then you've got the same sort of setup I do
II. Trivia: from what I understand switching from usb0 to enx025a4bb25708 was something about creating unique network ids so as they don't collide in a series of attempts to sort out linux networking.
III. To access the usb direct subnet on the other computers, I think there are several possible solutions:

1. Figure out how to run the linux device as a bridge so that the usb direct cameras request their IPs from the router using DHCP (or static routing).
2. Add a route on the router itself.
3. Add routes on the computers you want to access this.
4. Don't and proxy things on the linux device (in your case Mint; in my case RPI)
5. Wireguard ?

So far I've been primarily working with 3.
My cameras are USB-direct to a raspberry pi. Their subnet is 192.168.9.x/24. The network computers are on is 192.168.3.x/24 where the raspberry pi is 192.168.3.6.

By running,

sudo route -n add -net 192.168.9.0/24 192.168.3.6

on my mac, I can access all of the cameras because now they know to route over the RPI.

Solution 3 only works on a device-by-device basis though and non-rooted android doesn't provide access to route tables.

For 2, I've got it queued up for the next time the upstream router reboots, so hopefully that will give all of my devices access to the cameras directly.

For 1, I'm confident it is possible but I haven't figured it out yet. I think the basic setup would be (1) turn off dhcp assigning that faces the usb-directs and (2) bridge the internet-facing interface with all of the usb-directs so that they all go to the main network and get their dhcp there.
I'm a bit worried to try this because my RPI is headless (no monitor, mouse, or keyboard of its own), so anything that messes up its networking will make it utterly inaccessible.

I've also done a bit for 4 (proxy) with all 5 cameras visible on a page web page on the RPI from any local device which updates the image every second -- it's not RTSP but it's something.

[virmaior]

For docker, I'm guessing the issue was that you were using the wrong IP, but I'm not knowledgeable about that.

[clee604]

You're right i had figured out that 10.42.0.1 is the Mint box IP, and 10.42.0.234 is the Wyze cam IP. I only found out the wyze cam IP after the wyze cam app updated what its IP address was. Is there another way to determine it? ifconfig and ip a only show the linux box address and i can't ssh into camera without knowing the IP...

I'll have to try and figure out the static routes, but I'm trying to make the jump directly to the bridged adapter so it can pull an IP directly from the router which would bypass any need to use static routes at all.

[virmaior]

without dnsmasq , you can use sudo nmap -F 10.42.0.0/24 on the ip range to find everything there. That would help finding the IP address the camera has.
It may also be possible to give serve it an IP in one of the configuration files /etc/network/interfaces or some other location.

[clee604]

is there a way to determine what network configuration my Linux Mint is using? I can see there is a /etc/network/interfaces but it's pretty much blank. There is also no dnsmasq.conf file I can find...

I can do some configuration in the UI of Mint, but I think its limited and I wasn't able to get the bridging to work there.

[virmaior]

unfortunately, I don't know.

There's something like 4 ways of managing networks in linux:

1. /etc/network/interfaces
2. /etc/dhcpcd.conf
3. systemd's networkd
4. distro specific GUIs

dhcpd only incompletely supersedes interfaces so some things require going back to interfaces. networkd seems pretty robust. Most guides I found were for old school interfaces ...

I think you'll need to it directly rather than in GUI merely because this is a bit of a custom setup.

[clee604]

I managed to get bridging to work, and with the GUI of all things.

My main mistake was not rebooting the camera, as the IP pull is on the camera side (even if I restart the network service on the linux host, the wyze camera still holds on to the old IP).

For those in the future looking to set this up, on the wyze camera just turn on usb-direct and connect to linux host. On the linux host, create a bridge between eth0 (or whatever your ethernet interface is to the local network) and the wyze camera network interface (could be usb0 or in my case was enx------). Make sure it set to Automatic DHCP if you want it pull an IP from router.

In Linux mint GUI this duplicates the interfaces, so I had to remove the old 'wired connection' network (which generated a local 10.42.x network in my case). Reboot camera and I saw it pulled an IP via DHCP from my router.

Next step is to see if bonding with a wifi fallback will work, which i assume it should since now I have a local network IP, but I might have to set up the USB direct mac address to be the same as the wifi adapter? Will have to test...

edit actually how would bonding work in this scenario? looking at the interfaces on the camera with usb-direct on, it looks like it already uses wlan0. Would i set up wlan0 as the primary, and wlanold as the secondary?

Many thanks your help @virmaior !

[clee604]

I suspect it has something to do with DCHP, because when I set a static network on the linux host it seems to connect more constantly. When raising the usb0 manually and setting an IP, I'm also not able to use ifconfig usb0 dhcp start, it gives an error of ifconfig: bad address 'dhcp' for some reason but manually specifying an ip/subnet and broadcast address works fine

[clee604]

@gtxaspec is there a way to set a static IP for the usb0 interface on the wyzecam side? Then I could eliminate DCHP as the variable.

[gtxaspec]

no, not at the moment. can you test the new_init branch and see if that works better?

[clee604]

testing now, it got correctly got a DHCP ip on first boot, and it survived a reboot... so i think something in the init changes may have fixed it? Is this going to be moved into the master branch or are you just testing something?

[gtxaspec]

yes, a few more changes and it will be merged to master.