-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
Add An Unsupported wifi Dongle
In many cases, you can just plug in your USB wifi dongle and it will "Just Work (tm)" - but sometimes, it just won't. Here's how to get that off brand dongle you bought on DealExtreme to work.
Note: From time to time we release incremental updates for specific modules that are added as needed. The incremental updates are "rolled up" when we do new ev3dev-rootfs or ev3dev-modules releases so you don't need to monkey around with downloading specific drivers one at a time.
Use the 'lsusb' command to dump the current USB device list. For my TPLINK TL-WN725N device, it looks like this:
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0bda:8179 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.So, good news, the TL-WN725N uses a Realtek chipset, but which one?
Head on over to the Wikidevi site, then paste 0bda:8179 into the search window and you'll get some hits for that pid/vid combination.
A bit of reading and you'll find that it uses the Realtek RTL8188EUS chipset - and you can get drivers for it, but only for the Raspberry Pi.
You're in luck, I've just added this module to the module list! You gan get the latest and greatest modules on the ev3dev-releases site and look for the v00.01.01-rtl8188eu-module release, and download it.
Note, higher versioned ev3dev-rootfs and ev3dev-modules bundles will have these changes "rolled up" in them, so you won't need to go back and get the driver if you upgrade.
Using your mad nfs skilz as root, unzip the rtl8188ue tar file like this:
# cd /
# tar -pxvf /nfs/path/to/your/downloads/rtl8188eu.tar.gz
# depmod -aThat command is running as root so be careful. Basically, it changes the current directory to the very top of your filesystem, and then it extracts the contents of the rtl8188eu.tar.gz file (preserving permissions). The files will fit right into /lib/modules/... and /lib/firmware/... with no additional work on your part.
If you're paying attention, we did not even copy the rtl8188eu.tar.gz file to the EV3 first, we left it on the host machine!
Of course, you need to run depmod -a so that the module loader knows where to find the new module(s).
After that, it's just setting up your wifi configuration to work with this dongle!