Using an external USB wifi adapter on BlueOS

Blue Robotics Software BlueOS
1

Hello,
I’m using BlueOS in boat mode. I have a requirement to use a USB WiFi adapter (versus an external WiFi router/AP). The USB adapter is recognized by the PI as uap0, but I can’t see a straight forward way of configuring its ssid and IP within BlueOS.

Is there a way to do this that doesn’t involve breaking something in BlueOS?

I’d prefer to use the USB adapter versus an external Wifi Ethernet adapter/router for power and size reasons.

Thanks!

2

Hi @dev -
Is there a reason you can’t use the WiFi radio that’s built into the Raspberry Pi? You should be able to connect to WiFi networks from the WiFi icon in the upper right without any additional hardware required.
What USB WiFi adapter are you trying to use, can you share the specific model? It may not be supported in linux by default…

3

Hi Tony,

The RPI internal wifi doesn’t support external antennas which I need for added range during operation. The USB wifi adapter model seems to be supported by linux as the interface comes up and can be seen when running a ifconfig or an iwconfig, but shows as down since I can’t configure the SSID, etc. I realize I could probably configure it directly in the RPI, but this would likely break BlueOS, or at least require changes when upgrading etc. The model is a Alfa AWuS036ACH.

I thought I might be missing something easy to make this work, but if this isn’t the case, I’ll look at adding a dedicated wifi AP/router and interface with Ethernet to the RPI, as it may make more sense for future.

4

Hey @dev!

BlueOS uses wpa_supplicant to manage the wifi, and is hardcoded to the wlan0 interface.
What you can do to try to make it work is to rename the internal interface (wlan0 to something else), rename your external adapter to be the wlan0 and enable (“up”) it. You should do all of it while connected through a wired interface. Below I assume your external adapter is called wlan1:

  • ip link set wlan0 name wlan-internal
  • ip link set wlan1 name wlan0
  • ip link set wlan0 up

If this works, you would need to create a UDEV rule to make this permanent.

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5

I forgot to mention, but changing the wifi interface (also for a separate hotspot interface) is definitely something we want to support with a human-friendly UI in the future. My previous comment is just on the path of finding a workaround while we don’t support this.

6

Hi @rafael.lehmkuhl

Thanks for the instructions and the update. I want to try to minimize the amount of one-off customization I’m doing to the system, so I have elected to use an external hotpot for now. It will also allow for additional Ethernet based devices. However, it is very good to know that this will be looked at in the future as an alternative.

1 Like