Adding wi-fi to a Raspberry Pi without a powered hub #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi
Tutorial for getting a USB wifi adapter to work for a Raspberry Pi without using a powered hub from Mike Worth:
It is a commonly known problem that the Raspberry Pi cannot provide enough power for most USB wi-fi adapters. This can be solved with the use of a powered hub, however I have plans to integrate the Raspberry Pi into other devices; due to space constraints I decided that it would be better to convert a dongle to draw power separately to its data connection, also taking the opportunity to reduce the distance that it projects past the end of the board.
The starting point was a cheap dongle I bought from ebay for a couple of quid; luckily enough it’s based around the Ralink RT5370 chip, this makes it fairly straightforward to obtain drivers suitable for the Raspberry Pi. The first step was to take it to bits and see what I had to work with; this was achieved by bending a couple of tabs on the connector and slipping it off, after which the case pulled apart. No surprises here- a board with USB connection pads on one end, circuitry in the middle and an arial on the other end.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
This is all well and good, but for many Pi owners it would be far simpler to buy an Edimax EW-7811Un nano wireless dongle. In the UK, Amazons sell them for £9 ($14). It performs superbly without a powered hub, and the driver is now included in the official Raspbian distro (probably in Adafruit’s Occidentalis as well, for all I know), so it just works “out of the box”. It may be “commonly known” that the Pi cannot power a USB wifi adapter without a hub, but the EW-7811Un works fine on all of my Pis, including the original version I got in July.
This is all well and good, but for many Pi owners it would be far simpler to buy an Edimax EW-7811Un nano wireless dongle. In the UK, Amazons sell them for £9 ($14). It performs superbly without a powered hub, and the driver is now included in the official Raspbian distro (probably in Adafruit’s Occidentalis as well, for all I know), so it just works “out of the box”. It may be “commonly known” that the Pi cannot power a USB wifi adapter without a hub, but the EW-7811Un works fine on all of my Pis, including the original version I got in July.