Help a clueless rookie

Product support
1

Ok so I am not the greatest with this kinda stuff so bear with me and maybe spell things out like you would for a 3 year old :grinning:

I have made a magic mirror as a gift using a pi 3b+ and raspian stretch desktop. I wanted to use wifi connect so that when the kid I’m giving it to goes away to college, he can use this to connect to his wifi instead of using a keyboard/mouse to manually change from desktop.

I went to https://github.com/balena-io/wifi-connect/blob/master/README.md and hit yes to everything that it suggested. I saw dhcpdc is disabled, yet I don’t see wifi connect on my device.

I then found https://planb.nicecupoftea.org/2019/01/11/balenas-wifi-connect-easy-wifi-for-raspberry-pis/ and tried that. No luck either.

What am I missing? Am I better off having the kid change wifi access via the desktop in a dorm setting?

Thanks

3

Hi @motdog! If you’ve run the steps from the README, the device should have the wifi-connect binary but maybe it’s just not starting it on boot.

Does running wifi-connect --help give any output? or /usr/local/sbin/wifi-connect --help?

4

Wifi-connect - - help did give me a list of options. I haven’t tried the other

5

@pcarranzav any suggestions? Appreciate any advice. I couldn’t make sense of the options it showed. is there something to look for about starting on boot?

7

@motdog I think Pablo just wanted to see if wifi-connect is installed and can be run. From what you wrote it looks like it is.
For starters, when it is running you would expect it to create a wifi hotspot called ‘WiFi Connect’. Do you not see that wifi using your phone ?

8

@samothx No I don’t. I’ve rebooted the pi a few times as well

12

@motdog OK so it seems like you have successfully installed WiFi Connect, but you need to run it for it to do anything.

What you’ll need to do is next create a script that essentially says: do I have a WiFi connection? If yes continue else start wifi-connect. An example of one is here: https://github.com/balena-io/wifi-connect/blob/master/scripts/start.sh - this would need to be run automatically on startup. You can also customise the ./wifi-connect line here to include any other arguments such as network name and key. Here’s another example: https://github.com/balena-io/balena-fin-examples/blob/master/wifi-connect/start.sh

14

@chrisys thanks So basically copy/paste this whole thing into command line? Sorry I’m like a total rookie with this stuff. Am I understanding that once this is run, if I reboot at my home it should already recognize my home network and connect automatically. If I take the pi elsewhere, it would start upon boot and realize it doesn’t recognize a network, but I could go on my phone and use the credentials for where I am at?

16

@motdog You will need to download one of the above files. Looks like they are quite similar, the first one actually contains several choices how you can detect the devices state. The script probably needs to be made executable once on your harddisk using something like

sudo chmod +x <scriptname>

What the script will do is check if you are already connected to the internet and start wifi-connect if you are not.
If you want to have that check done automatically at boot you will have to add a startup script.

17

you can run it directly using something like

sudo ./<scriptname>

and the hotspot shoud show up if the device is not connected already