Micro SD card

[KE0FHS]

I've sort of lost track of where you're at in the process, so apologies if this is repetitive, but are you aware of the first-time boot up process for a new Pi-Star image? There are two possibilities:

1. Most commonly, you boot up, but since Pi-Star doesn't have your wireless network credentials (username and password), you need to wait three or four minutes until Pi-Star goes into Auto AP (automatic access point) mode.
   
   At that point, you can connect to the hotspot's wireless access point via your computer's WiFi settings (look for the Pi-Star-Setup access point, and use the default password, raspberry). That creates a direct wireless connection between your hotspot and your computer (but not the internet). At that point, you can begin to configure Pi-Star.
   
   The first thing you should do is go to the Configuration page, enter your wireless network credentials in the Wireless Configuration section, and then reboot (at the same time, disconnect your computer from the Auto AP connection and connect it back to your regular wireless network). At that point, as the hotspot is rebooting, it should connect to your regular wireless network, and then you can continue with your initial configuration.
   .
2. The alternative is to use the Pi-Star WiFi Builder tool (https://www.pistar.uk/wifi_builder.php) to manually create a wpa_supplicant.conf file with your wireless network credentials, copy that file into the root directory of your microSD card (after you have burned the fresh Pi-Star image to it, ejected it, and reinserted it into your computer), and then insert it into your hotspot and boot up. It should connect to your regular wireless network, and then you can continue with your initial configuration.
   
   (Note: You can ignore and dismiss any system message you get from your computer that says you need to format the microSD card when you first insert it or after you finish flashing the image. Etcher formats the card, writes the image, and verifies it was written correctly.)

If it helps you at all, all of these notes and hints are covered in sections 2, 3, and 4 of the Playing with Pi-Star article that is linked in my footer below.

[kt4naz]

Just received new raspberry pi zero-w and thought this might be my problem but cards still not working. Maybe I am missing something in the program-download and unzipping process???

Again, more detail is necessary to figure out exactly where you are experiencing a problem.

After you write the image to the SD card, does that SD card boot the RPi? And yes, to determine that answer, you are going to need to plug in a monitor to the mini-hdmi port and watch what is happening on the monitor. You should see a normal RPi boot process that looks similar to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Tw7U5EPYbs

Once you've determined that the RPi is in fact booting, that pretty much eliminates issues with writing the image to the SD card. If the RPi doesn't boot, try a different SD card (brand and size), until you get to one that does boot.

Then you can test and see if its connecting to the network correctly, and then test to make sure MMDVMHost is connecting correctly, and so on and so forth instead of just vaguely saying, "it doesn't work".

I was loosing my wifi connection with the RPi and laptop. I still don't know why or how but it happens at times.
I now have three cards ready to go into some new spots if I build any more; thanks so much for all the help.

I will try the cheap cards again when I have more time, but I now have thing under control as far as when to check my wifi connections from modem to laptop and RPi spot to laptop.


Thanks again for a great site and all the help,

tnaz
KT4NAZ