The Pi Zero (and Zero W) have support for acting as a USB gadget: that means that they can be configured to act as a USB device – like a serial port, an ethernet interface, a mass storage device, etc.

There are two different ways of configuring this support. The first only allows you to configure a single type of gadget at a time, and boils down to:

  1. Enable the dwc2 overlay in /boot/config.txt
  2. Reboot.
  3. modprobe g_serial

This process is more fully documented here.

The second mechanism makes use of the libcomposite driver to create multifunction gadgets. The manual procedure is documented in the kernel documentation. While it’s a useful feature, the configuration process requires several steps and if you only do it infrequently it can be easy to forget.

In order to make this easier for me to manage, I’ve wrapped the process up in a systemd template unit that takes care of the various steps necessary to both create and remove a multifunction USB gadget.

Once installed, creating a gadget that offers both a serial interface and a network interface is as simple as:

  1. Create a file /etc/gadget/g0.conf containing:

     USB_FUNCTIONS="rndis.usb0 acm.usb0"

  2. Run systemctl start usb-gadget@g0.

You can remove the gadget by running systemctl stop usb-gadget@g0. As with any systemd service, you can mark the unit to start automatically when your system boots by running systemctl enable usb-gadget@g0.

The systemd-usb-gadget project can be found at: