I’ve recently tried to setup a WiFi connection with the RaspberryPi and encountered some issues: the connection was not starting automatically. I am using following wifi adapter :
$ dmesg | grep usb
New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=8179
After researching the issue, I finally have a configuration that works reliably. Here are the steps I’ve followed.
One final bit left to do now: configuring our adapter. Before that
though, we should make sure that you have wpasupplicant package
installed since you’ll probably want to connect to a WPA secured
network:
$ sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant
WiFi configuration of router is as follows
Setting up the configuration
Edit the /etc/network/interfaces file to look like this:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp
#allow-hotplug wlan0
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-conf /etc/wpa.conf
Then add your WiFi parameters to /etc/wpa.conf.
network={
ssid="YOUR_SSID"
scan_ssid=1
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
proto=WPA
psk="YOUR_PASSWORD"
}
Restart your networking subsystem with:
$ sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
Connect automatically when booting
To make the connection work when the RaspberryPi boots, I have added a few lines to /etc/rc.local (source) :
echo "Starting WiFi..."
wpa_supplicant -B -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa.conf
sleep .5s
dhclient wlan0
echo "WiFi should be started"
exit 0
Keep the connection alive
To make sure that the connection stays up, I’ve done two things.
First, disable the power management of the WiFi dongle. Create a new /etc/modprobe.d/8188eu.conf file with this content:
options 8188eu rtw_power_mgnt=0 rtw_enusbss=0
Then, make the RaspberryPi ping the router every minute. Open your crontab:
$ crontab -e
and add this line at the end :
*/1 * * * * ping -c 1 192.168.1.1
Replace the IP address by the actual IP address of your router.
It took me some time to get it right, but now the Pi connection seems to work fine.
