Could not find a secondary wireless device

Project help
1

I’m trying to make my Pi work as a repeater. I was following along with the tutorial on Balena’s website and things were going very smoothly.

The Pi had connected to the BalenaCloud and started updating. at 79% I received this error “Could not find a secondary wireless device. Exiting…”

After a few minutes, the device went offline and I haven’t messed with it since.

I have an Amazon wifi dongle plugged into it, it seems to be having some sort of issue finding it. Does anyone have any suggestions, or should I send this wifi dongle back and try another?

Any and all help is appreciated, this is all VERY new to me.

3

Hello @PineAppleCawks first of all welcome to the balena community.

Could you please confirm what Pi are you using and the application that you are deploying?

Thanks

4

Morning mpous! and thanks for taking the time!

I have been following along with this tutorial On there it directed me to the wifi-repeater project from Balena github here

The Pi I have is a 3 labeled as model B+. I have noticed that the Raspberry Pi 3 “device type” option says something about those models not having 5 GHz. However, my model has 5 GHz, so I assume it is the pi 3 (64bit) device type. I must mention that I have tried both options and received the same result though.

When it appears in my dashboard I get the following sequence of events:

-Online (heartbeat only)
-Switches over to “updating” and a progress bar
-5-7 minutes pass, a yellow exclamation symbol pops up and says “VPN Disconnected” if I hover over it
-Somewhere around 75% on the update It hangs up and no more progress is made
-I click into the device and see the following

" wifi-repeater – WiFi repeater: starting…
wifi-repeater Wireless interfaces found: wlan0
wifi-repeater Wired interfaces found: eth0
wifi-repeater Creating WiFi AP on wlan0 with SSID “WiFi Repeater” and password “charlietheunicorn”…
wifi-repeater Ethernet device has no internet. Attempting to use secondary wireless device to connect to WiFi…
wifi-repeater Could not find a secondary wireless device. Exiting…"

At this point the Pi has created a visible wifi network that I can log into using the above password. However, it has no internet access. The terminal is unavailable and any actions I take in the device “Summary” page do nothing.

I have attempted to reflash the SD quite a few times and changed the variables inside the “add device” page. I have tried two different dongles. All attempts have ended in this result.

I am thinking I might just try and restart from the very beginning of the tutorial as I have just been restarting from the point that I click “Add device” on the Balena dashboard with no luck.

Anyway, thanks in advance for any, and all input!

5

Well, I don’t have a definitive answer as to how the problem was solved.

I deleted everything and started from scratch. Now things are working perfectly. I have run into a separate issue but will start a new thread for that.

thanks again!