The hardest part of every BeagleBone project seems to be getting WiFi working I followed the Adafruit tutorial and used the same TP-Link TL-WN727N as I’ve used before. I mostly had it working last night, but woke to it being off the network this morning. Figuring it was the usual bunk about power management, or wifi-reset services, I serial consoled in and started poking around. wlan0 is nowhere to be found. iwconfig is blank:
root@beaglebone:~# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.
eth0 no wireless extensions.
usb0 no wireless extensions.
lsusb shows the device, but my linux foo is too weak to poke much further.
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 148f:7601 Ralink Technology, Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
A guy on amazon says that maybe they’ve changed the chipset in these? If that’s the case, is there a reliable WiFi dongle for the BeagleBone that doesn’t require tremendous effort to get working? It took me 3 before I found the TL-WN727N.
Any Atheros based one is, generally speaking, good to go with Linux. One thing though to be aware of is the proximity of the USB port to HDMI and/or other parts. If you're not using HDMI, turn it off to limit interference. Another thing to do is have your dongle on the end of a 20-30cm USB cable just to get it away from the PCB itself as all designs vary a little even within Atheros and proximity may cause issues.
I’ve got it out on the end of a 6" extender. That and making sure I had a beefy wall wart was a big help in the past. I’d disabled HDMI on other projects, but didn’t this time since it’s out on the extender. Good point though. Worth a shot.
I’ve got Adafuit’s “814” adapter on order. Allegedly it works without much fuss. If that fails, I’ll double down on efforts to find a proper Atheros part.
Heh. So the Adafruit part was working, but then this morning, it’s decided to come up as wlan1 not wlan0 and is dead to WiFi again. I doubled up my entry in /etc/network/interfaces and it’s back.
I’ll need to punch some holes in the lid of my enclosure so the 3-man IT staff it takes keep Linux happy will be able to breathe in there…
I’ll say this though, this board (and others like it) are competing for mindshare in a pretty competitive space. That WiFi has been such a mess, and seems to only be getting worse isn’t going to help grow the platform.
Any of the "small" usb-wifi adapters has always been painful. With
the hdmi output right next to the usb adapter, unless you disable hdmi
it's very likely to cause issues.. If you use a usb-extension cable
even only a few inches that does help out.
Either way, getting a BeagleBone Black Wireless makes things easier as
the wifi antenna's are far from the hdmi output.
The current design has been trouble with those small usb-wifi adapters.
I have the adapter out on the end of a 6" cable. Even when it worked back home, it was flakey. Even after applying all the power-management voodoo, it was flakey. After applying everyone’s homegrown wifi-reset scripts, it was flakey.
I figured I might run into problems, so I grabbed an Arduino off my bench before I left home. I’m going to knock it out on that today and be done. Bonus, it won’t have to fsck all the time.
On Sat, 24 Dec 2016 12:27:17 -0800 (PST),
perverseosmosis@gmail.com declaimed the
following:
Bonus, it won't have to fsck all the time.
That... is a sign of either a failing memory... OR of someone who is
not properly shutting down the board (sudo shutdown -h now) and is just
pulling the power.
Even a Windows box won't take pulling the power while it has stuff
pending in RAM that hasn't been written to the disk.
This project was a small stepper for driving a microscope focusing knob and an IR blaster to drive a camera shutter for automating narrow-depth of field image stacking. The goal was to build a delightful tool he didn’t have to think about, and not an ongoing IT headache. It’s my fault for ignoring the warts in Linux (boot speed, GPIO slowness, wifi driver mess, filesystem fragility, security). I had one on hand and I used it, even though it wasn’t a good match for this project.
I followed the Adafruit tutorial and used the same TP-Link TL-WN727N as I’ve used before. I mostly had it working last night, but woke to it being off the network this morning. Figuring it was the usual bunk about power management, or wifi-reset services, I serial consoled in and started poking around. wlan0 is nowhere to be found. iwconfig is blank: