wireless adapter

[Arnold]

hi,

i look for a wireless adapter for the rp... any recommendations?

I see i need a "Red Pitaya supports USB dongles with Realtek chipset rtl8192cu."

i found this one:
http://www.edimax.eu/edimax/merchandise ... 722utn_v2/

Thanks,

[pavel]

Hi Arnold,

The only advantage of the Edimax adapter is that it's supported by the Red Pitaya Ecosystem. I don't know why the Red Pitaya developers decided to support this particular USB/Wi-FI adapter.

If you need a USB/Wi-FI adapter that works with the default Red Pitaya Ecosystem SD card, then the Edimax adapter is OK.

If you want a USB/Wi-FI adapter that would also work out of the box with other Linux based systems, then I'd suggest to buy a USB/Wi-FI adapter based on the MediaTek/Ralink chipsets.

The problem with the USB/Wi-Fi adapters based on the Realtek chipsets is that the driver from the Linux kernel (or so called in-tree or upstream driver) does not work well.

Last week, I looked at the status of the RTL8192CU driver for Raspberry Pi and found a few interesting discussions:

https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/755
https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/566
https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/369
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux. ... ral/105642
http://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=7930

The driver provided by Realtek (or so called out-of-tree driver) works much better but is not compatible with the wireless utilities (iw, hostapd, etc) included in the GNU/Linux distributions. To solve this problem, Realtek provides its version of the utilities that you need to build from sources. The utilities provided by Realtek are, of course, only compatible with the Realtek chipsets,

It took me quite some time to figure out all these problems and to include the Realtek drivers and two versions of the hostapd program to the latest version of the Debian based SD card image.

I have an adapter based on the MediaTek/Ralink RT5370 and it works perfectly with the drivers from the Linux kernel and wireless utilities included in the GNU/Linux distributions.

Here is the link to this adapter:

http://uk.farnell.com/jsp/search/produc ... id=2133900

Cheers,

Pavel