Raspberry Pi – Setting up Wi-Fi (Edimax)

Those who wish to wirelessly connect their Raspberry Pi to a network are faced with choosing the right Wi-Fi adapter. Depending on the adapter, set-up is either very easy or associated with considerable effort and potential complications. The reasons for this are the various chipsets that come with different Wi-Fi adapters. Problems particularly arise with completely new chipsets for which the Linux kernel does not yet provide a driver or for which a Linux driver does not even exist yet.

Recommendation Wi-Fi adapter

After having used many different Wi-Fi adapters on my Raspberry Pi at both greater and lesser expense, two personal favourites have emerged for me. The two Edimax Wi-Fi adapters are by far the easiest to set up:

No additional driver required

Due to low power consumption, the Edimax adapters can be used directly on the Raspberry Pi without an additional active USB hub. Both Wi-Fi adapters are recognized and integrated automatically because the kernel already has the appropriate driver (RTL8192CU) installed. After that, all that remains is the configuration of the wireless network.
 

Difficulty level:

Wi-Fi configuration under Raspbian

Raspbian recognizes he adapter as soon as it is inserted. You can check this easily by using the following command:

$ dmesg

Subsequently, we can see that a Realtek Wi-Fi adapter was recognized and that the corresponding driver has loaded:

After the stick was recognized, a new network device should appear which can simply be verified by using ifconfig:

$ ifconfig

Deactivate power saving

Before establishing a wireless network connection, the Edimax driver’s power saving function should be deactivated, otherwise the connection will be interrupted during inactivity. To avoid this, a configuration file for the driver must be created:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/8192cu.conf

This file gets the following content:

options 8192cu rtw_power_mgnt=0 rtw_enusbss=0

Establish connection (DHCP)

In order to establish a connection with our wireless network, we must now edit the file /etc/network/interfaces:

$ sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

and adapt its content:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp

auto wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ap-scan 1
wpa-scan-ssid 1
wpa-ssid "YOUR-WIFI-NAME"
wpa-psk "YOUR-WIFI-PASSWORD"

Finally, save the changes and restart the network service.

sudo service networking restart

Static IP address (optional)

If the Wi-Fi interface is to be assigned to a static IP address within the network, the file contents should look as follows:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.0.24
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.0.1

auto wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet static
address 192.168.0.23
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.0.1
wpa-ap-scan 1
wpa-scan-ssid 1
wpa-ssid "YOUR-WIFI-NAME"
wpa-psk "YOUR-WIFI-PASSWORD"

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