The RPi Zero W could work, so my WIFI environment is fine.
I could use WiFi dongle connect internet under Raspbian and Openhab so that the wifi dongle can work.
But the pi 2 could not work with the wifi dongle. I tried two brands; both of them were in the same situation. The act light flashed as -------.
Does balenaOS could not work with the wifi dongle?
Hi there @sarafina and welcome to the forums.
Not all WiFi dongles are supported under balenaOS, but we do have a list here: https://www.balena.io/docs/reference/hardware/wifi-dongles/
Is your dongle one of those on the list, if not could you let us know what make/model and chipset it is? You can get some information about the device by running lsusb in the terminal for the host OS. You can also watch the output listed in dmesg when you plug in the device for more information.
Dear Chrisys,
My wifi dongle is Adafruit Minaiature Wifi (802.11B/G/N) Module.
The information as following: Bus 020 Device 004: ID 0bda:8176 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. 802.11n WLAN Adapter Serial: 00e04c000001
Hope that will useful for trouble shooting.
Thanks for sharing the info. That is a supported card on our list so not sure what the issue is. Could you try using a powered USB hub between the Pi and dongle to see if it’s a power problem?
It’s really difficult to find a USB hub with a power adapter. And this dongle could work with other OS without power. Is it possible to make sure no other problems firstly?
I can confirm that this WiFi dongle does not work on RPi 2 under balenaOS 2.43.0+rev1. No driver is loading for it. I will try RPi 3 now and see whether there is a difference and afterwards I will pass the issue to our devices team.
The same dongle works on RPi 3, so it looks like an issue related to RPi 2. Here is the GH issue I created for tracking this: https://github.com/balena-os/balena-raspberrypi/issues/420
thanks