philip hahn wrote:I guess I'd have to look at a intermediary chip to packetize the information on the usb and make it easy to process. At that point I'm probably looking at an FPGA and then I might as well just use the ESP as a wifi module.
Since you want to achieve 32Mbit/s, you need a high speed USB host. Bit-banging implementations are only low speed and low-end microcontrollers with USB usually only support full speed, so neither of those are a viable option.
While you probably could use a powerful enough FPGA, I doubt that this would be a cost effective solution. You would also need to re-implement the entire RTL-SDR framework for FPGAs (and honestly: if you have a powerful FGPA, why would you use a crappy DVB-T stick for SDR?).
If you want to keep costs and effort to a minimum, I would recommend something that's capable of running Linux, either a RPi (or clone), or some OpenWrt router (the board wififofum should work, something like this would probably be the cheapest option).
About V-USB, @philip hahn, forget about this path ! I don't think there is any HOST implementation, only Client.
I didn't mentined it before, but back in October, I've looked to this issue of USB Hardware Host implementation, and even purchased an Arduino shield using MAX3421E, but "time is missing ingredient", the board is still untested.
Here is some ref : https://www.circuitsathome.com/mcu/mass ... 0-released
As @lethe said, FPGA solution is a bit overkill, although I love that path, it is not cost effective.
So, the solution is either OrangePi-One or RaspberryPi-Zero ...
Right now I use an early generation Pogoplug with a 900mhz ARM processor to stream my rtlsdr. It's a $10 device with a $8 dongle and horsepower to spare (also serves up web / local fileserver / etc)
My goal was to make a compact, portable, plug-and-play integrated wideband antenna with LNA, SDR over wifi. All you have to do is hook it up to 5vdc or a LiPo while mobile and have SDR at your fingertips using you phone / computer / tablet. Yes, the RLTSDR is a low end SDR, hence the desire to not spend a whole lot on the host machine! I have a $10 LNA, $8 SDR and am evisioning a < $10 computer, with an antenna costing < $10 (this, sans LNA: https://apollo.open-resource.org/missio ... na-for-sdr) total cost ~ $40 and then throw it up on github as a plug and play solution people could replicate. The idea is the LNA, SDR and computer would sit in the base of the tower, kind of like an Alexa or something just sit wherever it has a convenient view of the sky, location independant of the user. You could also throw a patch antenna on the top for GPS or Inmarsat.
Despite being a crappy 8 bit 2MHz bandwidth SDR you can still do a lot of cool things with it, including decode GPS, whose signal is well below the noise floor! I've been blogging on my experiances with gnss-sdr and RTL here: sdrgps.blogspot.com
Again thanks for the discussion and help. Initial reading got me real excited about the ESP8266 (although I see other projects it'd fit nicely!) you guys have sufficently brought be back to reality.
Philip Hahn