After a lot of huffing and puffing and making things over-complicated, I got my Raspberry Pi on the internet by wifi with the miniscule £8.27 EdimaxEW-7811UN WiFi dongle. Here’s how I set it up. NB: I’m using a Kindle power supply, which seems to provide enough current to run this tiny wifi adaptor plugged straight into the Pi’s USB socket (which will be important for FridgeGizmo). I am also using Raspbian wheezy 2012-08-16 as my OS.
1) I updated my firmware by installing and running rpi-update: https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update – new firmware includes drivers needed by this wifi dongle.
2) I followed these instructions: http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/1244/wifi-on-raspberry-pi-raspbmc
specifically the bit where you go to the root terminal and type:
nano /etc/network/interfaces
and add the below text to the end of the file:
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-conf /etc/wpa.conf
Then in the terminal type:
nano /etc/wpa.conf
and add the below text replacing NETWORK_SSID with my wifi network name and NETWORK_PASSWORD with my wifi password:
network={
ssid="NETWORK_SSID"
proto=RSN
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=CCMP TKIP
group=CCMP TKIP
psk="NETWORK_PASSWORD"
}
Then at the command line I typed
sudo ifup wlan0
and my wifi dongle lit up blue, and I got on t’internet. Phew!
I’m now getting Apache and PHP installed on the Pi using this tutorial: http://fusionstrike.com/2012/installing-apache2-raspberry-pi-debian
this dongle worked out of the box for me with no installs, just added my network to wifi config in the os gui
Alan,
I am going to install my Edimax later this week. What distro are you using on your pi? Mine is quite an early one and may be out of date by now.
Thanks,
Ed.
i cant seem to figure out how this edimax wlan stick works.
sometimes when i restart it works, sometimes not. -.-
but thanks for the article…. it helped kinda ^^
Thanks. FYI, this works with 2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian too.
Hello there, i’ve tried doing what you posted here following the exact same steps in this post and can’t get my dongle to work :S i have the exact same model.
Any ideas what might be missing here? My Wlan encription is WPA2 btw, not sure if that makes a difference here.
OK, just managed to make it work using this tutorial
http://www.marcomc.com/2012/09/how-to-configure-wireless-lan-on-raspberrypi-with-raspbian-kernel-3-2-27-and-solwise-rtl8188cus-wifi-dongle/
Really sorry for late moderation of comments – email notifications from my own blog weren’t reaching me. They are now. Catching up!