Raspberry Pi Wifi

Sat Dec 21, 2013 by Bill Farmer. Categories: Hacking .

When I got my Pi some months ago I bought a wifi adapter for it, as you do. But I couldn’t get it to work reliably in Raspbian, and I didn’t even try in Arch Linux. So I tested the adapter on my windoze box, and it worked just fine, and I tried it with Linux and it worked just fine, so I put it in the ‘too hard’ box.

I dug it out again the other day because I wanted to hear just how good the Sonivox EAS library I ported to the Pi sounded when hooked up to the hifi with some decent speakers. After extensive googling, and putting together various bits and pieces of info from various blog posts, and wikis, I came up with sort-of working configs for Raspbian and Arch Linux.

Raspbian

/etc/network/interfaces:
    
    auto lo
    iface lo inet loopback
    
    iface eth0 inet dhcp
    
    auto wlan0
    iface wlan0 inet dhcp
    wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

You can use wpa_passphrase to generate the wpa_supplicant.conf file:

$ wpa_passphrase ssid passphrase

    network={
            ssid="ssid"
            #psk="passphrase"
            psk=41167ee7545cb4d9b1c7d7e113cfc1f0ac367b020141c46c9418965c1926fd80
    }

Redirect the output to the wpa_supplicant.conf file. I found this in the Arch Linux wiki. The wpa-conf and wpa-roam stanzas do not appear to be officially documented anywhere I can find.

Raspbian Jessie

If your wifi router has a WPS button, press it. Run wpa_cli on the Pi and enter the following commands:

    > wps_pbc
    > quit

This should automatically pick up the ssid and key, connect, and set up wpa_supplicant.conf so that the Pi will reconnect when rebooted.

Arch Linux

Use wifi-menu to create a netctl profile. Use netctl list to list profiles and netctl to enable and start your profile.

    sudo netctl enable wlan0-yourSSIDhere
    sudo netctl start wlan0-yourSSIDhere

This appears to work just fine.

Bill Farmer