Connecting a Chromecast to Ethernet, no Wi-Fi

Need to hook a Chromecast up to Ethernet ‘cos your Wi-Fi doesn’t play well with others?

(It can be done, but let me rant a bit before I tell you how)  I’ve looked into this before when I realised my work network didn’t support WPA2 and working nightshift was starting to suck.  The short answer was no, it’s not possible.  The Chromecast simply doesn’t like to talk to anything but standard household Wi-Fi security and proxies make it quiver.

I’ve tried using a spare laptop as a Wireless Access Point then bridging the connection to the ethernet, using a spare mac mini in case it was a hardware disagreement, tunnelling through the proxy and sharing the tunnel (unable to tunnel from work unfortunately), it just doesn’t want to play ball.  Your work situation might be different, so try a few of those out yourself.  Short of providing a nice WPA or WPA2 connection and a tunnel straight out to the world wide web, you’re not getting it running.  I’d asked a friend about it (who’s kind of flash with these things) and he came to the same conclusions, as he’d tried the same.

Recently my friend was asked the question again (this time specifying they weren’t going to spend any money as this is for an official work thing and they didn’t have budget) and we both concluded they need to take our advice and buy an access point and organise a pipe straight out to the internet.

Hypothetically, if you did want to do it and had budget (stay with me there’s a free ish way) you could make use of USB-OTG or usb host capability of the Chromecast.  This has only newly been added and would require a cable or 2.  An ethernet to usb adaptor and a USB-OTG  cable.  Pictured below…

 

 

 

 

 

 

But you’re going to need a budget for those.  So can we make them ourselves from spare cabling?  More on that DIY in another post.  But yeah, the steps involved are basically the following:

1. Turn your phones Wi-Fi access point on so your phone then set up the Chromecast on the network for the first time after you get it out of the box.  This just gives it a name and preps it for the internet world.
2. Once this is done, plug your cables in.  It’s pretty easy, the cables can only go in the sockets they were intended for, so I’m not describing that.
3. Plug in your Chromecast like normal via hdmi and your ethernet to the cabled network.
4. Buy the network guy with a few beers to organise a pipe straight out of the network bypassing the proxy and lock it down for that 1 specific MAC address.  Security (ish.  I know it’s not perfect, but hide the cable so no one can guess how you did it and pick an attack vector).

Voila!

Update: I finished the DIY OTG-USB cable and it’s testing fine so far.  Just waiting for confirmation when I can get hold of the usb to ethernet adaptor now.

Final Update:  IT WORKS!