Adhoc Network on BBB not Working

I am trying to get an adhoc network up and running on a BeagleBone Black. Ideally, I would like to use this to connect to an embedded BBB without it being on the ‘corporate’ network.

Here are the commands that I am using to configure my Belkin Wi-Fi dongle:

ifconfig wlan0 down
iwconfig wlan0 mode ad-hoc
iwconfig wlan0 essid chair01 ap 94:44:52:E7:29:E0 channel 6
ifconfig wlan0 192.168.2.240
ifconfig wlan0 up

Below are the outputs from iwconfig and ifconfig after doing the above commands:

iwconfig:
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:“chair01”
Mode:Ad-Hoc Frequency:2.437 GHz Cell: 94:44:52:E7:29:E0
Tx-Power=20 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:on

ifconfig:
wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 94:44:52:E7:29:E0
inet addr:192.168.2.240 Bcast:192.168.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::9644:52ff:fee7:29e0/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:29 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:27 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:8574 (8.3 KiB) TX bytes:3978 (3.8 KiB)

My Apple devices do not see the adhoc network at all. A wireless analyzer running on an Android tablet does see it but the table O/S does not! I do see it on an Ubuntu workstation but when I try to connect it fails. As you can see from the above there is a conversation going on…just not a connection!

The Wifi dongle is in a powered hub and the BBB is itself powered from a 5v supply.

Any help would be appreciated.

An added detail for this post. Without changing anything I suddenly saw the network appear on my iPad AND was then able to connect. After a reboot of the BBB the network, configured in the same way, showed up on the wi-fi analyzer but was not visible on the iPad…then it disappeared from the wi-fi analyzer, presumable as it must have crashed.

After running the above commands it reappeared on the analyzer but was not visible to the iPad. THEN…when I issued an ifconfig wlan0 down followed by an ifconfig wlan0 up…I was able to connect!!! Further…when doing this the connection seems to be more stable?

Any idea what gives?

Thanks, Will

I had the same type of issue. What worked for me is to install and configure dhcp and set a static ip address on the BBB.