forum.pistar.uk

I've set up a hotspot with a repurposed Raspberry Pi2 B and a DV-Mega dual-band hat and I can access it fine over Ethernet. But I want to use WiFi as the main connection. The Pi came with a custom home automation app (now replaced by Pi-Star) on SD card and a TP-Link USB dongle for WiFi support. But the version of Pi-Star I'm using (4.14.79-v7+) does not apparently support the TP-Link dongle. It remains resolutely 'down' even though I have a correct wpa_supplicant file installed.

The lsusb command shows the dongle to be: Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:8179 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8188EUS 802.11n. The driver for this is apparently not included in standard Pi OS distributions but needs to be added.

Would perhaps a different version of Pi-Star include the driver for TP-Link? Or is there a known dongle that does work?

Or should I just junk the Pi 2 and start with a new Pi 3 with onboard WiFi?

You'll need to manually update/ install the driver for Ur hardware.

Or purchase a rasp pi supported WiFi dongle from adafruit, pimorini, pi-hut etc.
Which would work with the std. drivers included with the raspbian image.

Andrew M1DNS, (Mod)

Just fitted a genuine PiHut dongle and still not recognised with an 'Interface is down' message in the config screen. This with both the latest Beta and the release versions of PiStar.

Beginning to think there's a hardware problem. Next stop Pi3 with onboard WiFi?

Don’t know if this will help, but have you tried to bring up the wireless interface manually? SSH in, then run “ifup wlan0”. If no luck try a 1 instead of a zero (wlan0 may be for an onboard wifi interface). If you get a message that the interface is up, then you can see if the config screen in pi-star will get you going. You may have to use sudo before the ifup command, I don’t recall. ifdown wlan0 shuts off the wireless interface, btw. I use the ifdown command when connected via USB to my phone and don’t want or need the wifi interface.

Many thanks for the suggestion. I'll give that a try. Failing that I'll attach a keyboard and screen and boot into a vanilla Raspbian OS and see if I can get wireless to work that way.

This thread although dated some may help you
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/view ... hp?t=57426
and this
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/view ... p?p=462982

After a full-on two weeks with both my day jobs, I finally got back to this.

SSH into pi-star.local and the following:

ifup wlan0
ifup: failed to open lockfile /run/network/ifstate.wlan0: Permission denied

ifup wlan1
ifup: unknown interface wlan1 - which is what I expected given there is only one WiFi device.

I'm still none the wiser I'm afraid.

EDIT - tried instead with 'sudo ifup wlan0' and it responds with 'interface wlan0 already configured' but the pi-star config screen still shows 'interface is down'

Finally fixed.

To close the loop on this - and to help any others in the same boat - I have found and fixed the problem. It was the wireless router that was to blame.

I'm aware that some routers simply don't like some other makes of WiFi adaptors. So instead of the Cisco device I was trying to connect to, I changed the network to one based around a Mikrotik Routerboard and it connected instantly.

But to be fair the error message ' interface is down' is a bit misleading. It suggests there's a physical problem somewhere. Maybe 'not connected to wlan' or 'wlan not connected' would be better in the circumstances?