OK I just had a flashback that reminded me of something crazy I did long ago that could help you out. I will spare you the details, but basically someone gave me an old messed up phone and I was able to get the thing to turn on by supplying power directly to the contacts where the battery connects. Using a power supply (perhaps a wall wart in combination with a buck converter) would allow you to power the tablet, bypassing the issue of charging while using the USB OTG port for the drive.
You may need to add power to the drive separately with a powered hub or some sort of hacked together setup, but I think removing the battery from the equation might make it easier to get the tablet set up the way you want it. If you still want battery backup then a cheap ~$20 UPS should have more than enough juice for 1 drive and 1 tablet for a fair bit of time.
thanks @KleerKut , i think i will be OK with that because the external HDD must be powered with a wall wart anyway since its a 3.5" and although the OTG cable wont send data and power, it ALSO has a separate 5V plug so i should be good with that.....thank you for the suggestion though, i may find i need to use that at some point
yea the thing is though that im fairly cheap and prefer the speed of SSD's in my computers.....but i don't want to buy SSD's for each machine that i have that are large enough to make copies of the external that i have which is 2TB so i think that having one central resource makes sense here....im sure that will soon be more feasible for a cheapskate like me but for now it would just be very difficult thanks though thats a good suggestion
update: perhaps yall dont care but im going to post it just in case someone sees this and wants to try something similar... using paragon ntfs i can view and modify the files but it doesnt mount the drive as a typical drive as best as i can describe but rather seems like it mounts it as a virtual drive if that makes sense, meaning the OS cant see it, only paragon and total commander can. this is probably something that someone said or intimated towards and i just didnt understand it that said, i did find the following link to installing ntfs-3g:
it looks promising in that i did find an ftp share app that i believe i could use to share the drive if i could get it to mount, i guess, well not natively but at the OS level rather than through an app (yes i am sure i am using the wrong terminology here, my apologies) i will probably give that all a shot after a job interview that i have tonight and after getting drunk after the interview because i will almost certainly bomb it o well...but dont worry, ill try it with an NTFS-formatted flash drive FIRST before trying it with my 2TB drive i am getting an RPi3 to use as an emulator but i may also be getting an old xbox that i could use for emulation for my old games in which case i can use the RPI exclusively for samba sharing which i am quite sure for my use would be sufficient...but i am still not giving up on the tablet thing just yet last question though - does anyone know without dual-booting which i know i can do, is there a way to have the RPi be an emulator AND share at the same time, or in other words run Retropie with a samba share also running in the background? i realize that it would be resource-intensive for such a small and slow machine and up/down speeds would suffer of course BUT since i only need to use a single USB port for just a controller and the rest of the emulation is done on the CPU/GPU, and since the share would primarily be using resources from the eth/USB chip with some CPU resources, i am thinking that with the 3 it may be possible......thoughts? anyways i will continue to update because, well, i dont have a job anyways so what the hell why not
I don't know if RetroPie itself is easy to work with on things outside of emulators since I have never used it. Every one of those emulators should work in other distro's. I would just install only the emulators actually being used, omit the rest, and have a full desktop that can do all of the other desktop type things. If you want to have it setup up to use full gamepad support to play games from boot AND do desktop stuff then you need to have a way longer beard than mine to make it happen.
Going so far to have it as a server and a gaming machine I would just buy an Apollo Lake board. I have a Braswell board and laptop and they are plenty capable for playing videos, some games, and other desktop stuff while really not using drastically more energy than a Pi and not drastically more expensive for a fully assembled machine with all the bells and whistles. I know you want to learn and have fun with your projects, so the desktop board won't fill that need, but I don't know if the Pi would ever give you a satisfactory result no matter how much money and effort is thrown at it. It depends on what specific functions, looks, and other nuances specific to you that you want to get out of it. If you have the money to burn then go for it! If you don't then I would wait for better SoC boards or go low end or used x86.
i realize to most of yall this would be simple/stupid but im just glad that i was able to do it that said, yall were right, its slow as hell BUT it works and its muuuuuuuuch more reliable than the paragon/total commander FTP share i had to use an ftp share because the ONLY samba sharing program i found wouldnt work with it as far as i can see but o well as for media, its basically a no-go since it takes 35 min to copy over an 800mb video file but i do find myself fixing others' computers constantly so i am considering hooking this up to a dedicated drive with a bunch of small programs that i find myself constantly transferring to peoples' comps like paint.net and things like that or maybe ill just scrap it and use a cheap laptop, i havent decided long story short, it works without paragon using the link mentioned above and the debug bridge on a really cheap crappy tablet so perhaps it would actually be worth doing with a tablet that has a decent soc or even one with an atom or something like that
didnt wind up having that interview i mentioned (yet) but thats OK and i really appreciate the kind words about it
off to drink more and celebrate (its the little things...even if they barely work haha)
another update...i really wasnt satisfied with not being able to stream by movies but i realized that i had enough speed and the problem was simply using FTP either through windows or filezilla, requiring a complete copy before anything would play......so....add the source in kodi and voila, streaming media box that loads up movies in about 5-10 seconds and plays on....i havent tried it while accessing other files on there but hey im still happy as it is...so....im chalking this one up as a win, even if the other files take, o say two hours to send while watching a movie, well at least ill have something to do in the meantime
last update - this thing streams 1080p while also uploading videos juuuuust fine, though while uploading to the share it takes 20-30 seconds to initially buffer the movie that you want to play but honestly im good with that
i think i might add a bittorent client to it so that i can set what torrents i want (of course ill only be torrenting legal material) so that once the torrent completes it transfers to the shared drive and stops uploading (yup im that guy).....maybe.....anyways for what i was looking for its slow but it works quite well and has yet to panic or anything like that
