keeganpoppen

this is great, and im super into it, but i do find it kind of funny how the other post the author mentioned was “super vague”, whereas somehow installing ansible and blindly installing a random playbook is any more explicative. (for me it’s fine because i’m always happy to read the code— i’m not complaining)

really glad to see a quality comparison; definitely gonna try this with my pi zero w i have lying around.

geerlingguy
The main comparison here is that IMO, if you've never encountered UVC-gadget, OTG configuration, dtparams, etc., then seeing/auditing an Ansible playbook that can reproducibly set up a Pi over and over is a lot simpler than reading through about 20 different steps of instructions that are setting up serial interfaces and the like.

In the former case, you have something that many of us who are more intimate with code could follow along with and tweak. In the latter, it's something that still requires a little knowledge, but IMO a lot less to get started.

Something like https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam takes it a step further, but obfuscates some of the code more (IMO) by bundling it in an image that is generated with some build scripts (though that might be the direction I move my project eventually... people don't seem to care as much about trust and auditability nowadays).