Wifi Dongle

Aandreasb · Mar 5, 2019

So, I haven't tried to connect to anything. I thought that the first step was getting an IP in the list of network devices. But, yes - there are a few of the networks listed that I can connect to.
Does it mean I can connect to them?

giuliomoro · Mar 5, 2019

If the network you want to connect to is listed there, and you have appropriately set the network name and passphrase in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf, and there are no typos involved, then doing ifup wlan0 should try to connect to the network, and, upon success, obtain an IP address.
Another thing to check is that your network router actually has a DHCP server on it to assign IP addresses. This is normally the default on home networks. If your computer can connect to this network and work properly without a special configuration, then it's probably safe to assume the DHCP is working fine.

Aandreasb · Mar 8, 2019

Hi
So I put in some quotation marks (") since I had a space in the network name, and the printout from the ifup/down has changed:

root@bela:~# ifup wlan0; ifdown wlan0;
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client 4.3.5
Copyright 2004-2016 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/

Listening on LPF/wlan0/8c:3b:ad:2f:39:26
Sending on LPF/wlan0/8c:3b:ad:2f:39:26
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 3
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 8
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 16
DHCPREQUEST of 192.168.0.102 on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPOFFER of 192.168.0.102 from 192.168.0.1
DHCPACK of 192.168.0.102 from 192.168.0.1
bound to 192.168.0.102 -- renewal in 25 seconds.
Killed old client process
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client 4.3.5
Copyright 2004-2016 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/

Listening on LPF/wlan0/8c:3b:ad:2f:39:26
Sending on LPF/wlan0/8c:3b:ad:2f:39:26
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPRELEASE on wlan0 to 192.168.0.1 port 67

Still, i don't get any ip address when I do ip a. (I get: 3: wlan0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state DOWN group default qlen 1000
link/ether 8c:3b:ad:2f:39:26 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff)
Does it mean that it is still not connected?

giuliomoro · Mar 8, 2019

Hmmm that's weird:

DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 16
DHCPREQUEST of 192.168.0.102 on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPOFFER of 192.168.0.102 from 192.168.0.1
DHCPACK of 192.168.0.102 from 192.168.0.1
bound to 192.168.0.102 -- renewal in 25 seconds.

would indicate that you are actually successfully connected.

not sure about the

Killed old client process
...
DHCPRELEASE on wlan0 to 192.168.0.1 port 67

part ...
Did you retry ifup wlan0; ifup wlan0 ?

Aandreasb · Mar 11, 2019

Hi,
so I did only
root@bela:~# ifup wlan0;
and got
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client 4.3.5
Copyright 2004-2016 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/

Listening on LPF/wlan0/8c:3b:ad:2f:39:26
Sending on LPF/wlan0/8c:3b:ad:2f:39:26
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 8
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 9
DHCPREQUEST of 192.168.0.102 on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPOFFER of 192.168.0.102 from 192.168.0.1
DHCPREQUEST of 192.168.0.102 on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK of 192.168.0.102 from 192.168.0.1
bound to 192.168.0.102 -- renewal in 31 seconds.

and now I finally got an IP when I do ip a. So, I guess it finally worked! Thanks for all the help
best,
Andreas

giuliomoro · Mar 11, 2019

Great!

andreasb So I put in some quotation marks (") since I had a space in the network name, and the printout from the ifup/down

hmm, that was not the case here

andreasb ssid="VIBRA_network"

Bbj_gzp · Mar 24, 2019

giuliomoro
I have a strange problem since i tried to install the wifi dongle as explained above.
I got it to install the files, it took some time and finished telling there were time skew errors.
Then i rebooted bela, since then it is not recognized by the Windows PC anymore when i plug the
USB connector. No sound of new connected device, no bela partition in the explorer, bela IDE doesn't
load in browser and ssh doesn't work either. i'm out of ideas.

giuliomoro · Mar 25, 2019

How did you shut down the board after installing the driver? If the shutdown was not graceful am afraid you may have a corrupted file /lib/modules/4.4.113-ti-xenomai-r148/modules.dep.bin (and possibly more), similarly to what happened here. If you don't have a UART device at hand (or a spare Bela, that is, then you may have to re-flash your card.

The "date skew" error is normally not a problem, though you can avoid it by loading up the IDE before you start the process.

Bbj_gzp · Mar 25, 2019

giuliomoro
Thanks for the fast diagnose!
You nailed it probably, after installation i closed the terminal and power cycled (hard) for the reboot.

No second Bela at hand and i got mine without the SD card early December.

I was planning to get a second Bela anyway, so i'll take it a bit earlier than planned
Can you confirm that if i order a Bela now from the shop, that it will come with a never software version that has the netgear drivers pre-installed?

giuliomoro · Mar 25, 2019

bj_gzp Can you confirm that if i order a Bela now from the shop, that it will come with a never software version that has the netgear drivers pre-installed?

No, you would still have to go through the manual installation process.

bj_gzp I was planning to get a second Bela anyway, so i'll take it a bit earlier than planned

That's great. However, let me be clear: you don't actually need another Bela to get the first one to work. You can just get an SD card and flash it with the image and then follow the instructions to copy the content of the SD card to the eMMC. If you had another Bela, you would be able to use it as a UART adapter as explained at the link in the previous post (or you could use any other UART adapter you may have around). You would then:

remove the Bela cape
connect your UART adapter as explaineder here
login on to the board via UART: (e.g.: screen /dev/tty.usb... 115200)
once you get prompted for username, type root
once logged in, redo make install in your module
try to manually load the module in order to make sure that the dependencies file is working ok: modprobe -a rtl8812au
if this is all successful, gracefully reboot the board
everything should be back to normal, plus wifi should work

Bbj_gzp · Mar 25, 2019

I'll give the SD card method a try first.

Bbj_gzp · Apr 15, 2019

bj_gzp
The SD restore procedure worked like a charm with v.0.3.6b!
Thanks

Ccynthiak · Jun 20, 2019

giuliomoro Hello,
my supervisor and I recently were trying to copy a package into Bela using scp. After that we tried to rename the folder which had the name of "???" to some other name (using the command mv). After doing that everything on the terminal stopped working as if the whole Bela operating system has been erased. It wouldn't recognize commands such as cd.. I don't know what went wrong but do the steps in the above post help in order to "restore" the board?
Appreciate your advice.
Thanks !

giuliomoro · Jun 23, 2019

It's very weird, not sure what you screwed up there. Is there anything on the board that you would like to recover or are you happy with just re-flashing it?

HjalteBestedMoeller · Jun 6, 2020

I have been throught all this post. Same adapter, i.e. NETGEAR A6100-100PES AC600 802.11AC

Bela image, v0.3.7d, 11 March 2020

root@bela:~# lsusb
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0846:9052 NetGear, Inc. A6100 AC600 DB Wireless Adapter [Realtek RTL8811AU]
B

After installing the driver, https://github.com/abperiasamy/rtl8812AU_8821AU_linux the device shows up when doing 'ip a'

4: wlan0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether bc:a5:11:38:49:a8 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

Relevant lines from interfaces:

# WiFi Example
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

wpa_supplicant looks like follows:

root@bela:~# cat /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
network={
        ssid="BelaRouter"
        #psk="MyPassword"
        psk=bbc878da83e4d2c83a69fe46f5a1aa2da38546faa7d822fa5b073f2daecb5615
}

The router shows up correctly in the scan:

root@bela:~# iwlist wlan0 scanning 
wlan0     Scan completed :
         Cell 03 - Address: CC:32:E5:86:CA:DC
                    ESSID:"BelaRouter"
                    Protocol:IEEE 802.11bgn
                    Mode:Master
                    Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11)
                    Encryption key:on
                    Bit Rates:144 Mb/s
                    Extra:rsn_ie=30140100000fac040100000fac040100000fac020000
                    IE: IEEE 802.11i/WPA2 Version 1
                        Group Cipher : CCMP
                        Pairwise Ciphers (1) : CCMP
                        Authentication Suites (1) : PSK
                    IE: Unknown: DD8E0050F204104A0001101044000102103B0001031047001038833092309218839C77CC32E586CAC41021000754502D4C696E6B10230009544C2D57523834314E1024000431342E3010420003312E301054000800060050F20400011011001B576972656C657373204E20526F7574657220544C2D57523834314E10080002210C103C0001011049000600372A000120
                    Quality=96/100  Signal level=-45 dBm
                    Extra:fm=0003

Cell 03 is the router i need to connect to. Model is
TP-Link Wireless N Router WR841N
Model No. TL-WR841N

But when i try to get the connection up i get

root@bela:~# ifdown wlan0; ifup wlan0;
Killed old client process
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client 4.3.5
Copyright 2004-2016 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/

Listening on LPF/wlan0/bc:a5:11:38:49:a8
Sending on   LPF/wlan0/bc:a5:11:38:49:a8
Sending on   Socket/fallback
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client 4.3.5
Copyright 2004-2016 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/

Listening on LPF/wlan0/bc:a5:11:38:49:a8
Sending on   LPF/wlan0/bc:a5:11:38:49:a8
Sending on   Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 8
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 9
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 12
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 12
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 12
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 1
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.

I have tried several times. I'm positive that the SSID and PassPhrase are spelled correctly...

Any ideas of how I can proceed to get success ?

Thank you,
Hjalte

HjalteBestedMoeller · Jun 6, 2020

Oh year,

and DHCP is working fine on the router... i can connect my laptop, iPhone etc... I can also access Bela through the router if I connect it via ethernet cable...

Router is running with WPA2-PSK AES encryption

giuliomoro · Jun 6, 2020

I have received a similar report a couple of weeks ago, related to this very same USB dongle. This was working in September 2018 (Bela image v0.3.5a). I don't think anything relevant has changed on the Bela image since, but it's possible. Several things have changed in the driver itself. You may want to try and roll back either or both and see where it stopped working

HjalteBestedMoeller · Jun 6, 2020

I'll try some earlier versions of the driver first then. Thank you for your prompt reply !

HjalteBestedMoeller · Jun 6, 2020

It's now working.
Bela Image v0.3.7.b
and checkout earlier driver:
rtl8812AU_8821AU_linux-4d1726146fd96552c9fa5af05c75187027d6885b

I have not tried any newer versions, but I might take the time to find the latest working driver and write which one in this thread

Thank you again!