[defparam]

One of the unfortunate things about the Raspberry Pi Zero is that the second micro usb is power only. For this type of configuration I encourage all to check out the Allwinner ARM-based SoCs and boards built from friendlyelec. With the NanoPi Neo I was able to enable USB ethernet gadget mode on its micro-usb and then have it host and power another device on its USB-A (for me a mobile phone). In my use case the laptop powered both the NanoPi and charging the mobile device all from USB power while also acting a an ethernet packet router from the mobile device back to the laptop all over USB on its own subnet.

https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...

[hinkley]

I ran out of ports on the usb charger I was using to run my little cluster so I have a couple of the lower power devices daisy chained off of the higher power ones.

It does mean that some devices will power off unexpectedly when others restart but unexpected restarts are something you have to plan for anyway.

[roeles]

Many clones have two usb ports, with one being OTG capable. For example the mango pi mq.

[megous]

Yeah, anything based on H3/H5 SoCs will work fine for this use case due to the SoCs having 4 separate USB host controllers, one of them muxed with OTG controller. That's a lot of I/O flexibility.