Pi 2 and Wi-Fi

[drx]

Hi

Just like to say how much I am enjoying the Raspberry Pi robot that I bought and built last year. Great product. I do have a couple of questions:
1) Does the downloadable image Dawnrobotics image work with a Raspberry Pi 2? If not should I should I just build from a compatible distro?

2) I would eventually like the robot to alert me via email if certain events are triggered, my pack of small dogs barking! I ve been playing with adding a second wifi dongle, putting it as wlan1 in the interfaces file to connect to my home network, without much success. However I can’t even seem to set it up with a single dongle to connect to my home network. It seems to flick between logging onto the network then setting up as a hotspot and just keeps repeating the cycle. I have modified both the interfaces file and the wpa_supplicant.conf file to be the same as on another SD card that is running a straight Raspbian that can connect to network fine.

I am very much a newbie and any help/advice gratefully received!

[Puma]

I cannot advise you on the rest, but I can confirm the image http://downloads.dawnrobotics.co.uk/sd_ ... -raspbian/ does work with Raspberry PI 2, much to my own relief when I made the decision to order only the robot kit and get Raspberry PI 2 board separately.

[Alan]

Hi there,

Glad to hear you're having fun with the robot.

To get WiFi working with your wireless router you'll need to take the following steps to disable the access point behaviour.

Firstly run

sudo service hostapd stop
sudo service isc-dhcp-server stop
sudo update-rc.d hostapd disable
sudo update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server disable

The last 2 commands stop the hostapd and dhcp services starting up on boot.

You may also need to disable the wifi_keep_alive.py script. This is done by opening up the /etc/rc.local file

nano /etc/rc.local

and then commenting out (put a # at the start of the line) the line that reads

python /home/pi/raspberry_pi_camera_bot/keep_wifi_alive.py &

The keep_wifi_alive.py script was written as when running off batteries, the WiFi dongle may not start up properly on bootup. This script checks periodically to see if WiFi has no IP address and if so shuts networking down, and starts it back up again. If you're familiar with python then rather than disable the script, it may be better to just comment out the lines in /home/pi/raspberry_pi_camera_bot/keep_wifi_alive.py that enable the hostapd and dhcp service.

Anyway, if you make it through all that, then hopefully your changes to /etc/network/interfaces should work as you expect. Sorry that modifying the WiFi isn't easier than this. In the long run I'd like to extend the robot's web interface so that you change WiFi settings but times a bit short at them moment.

Regards

Alan

[drx]

Hi

Thanks to Puma and Alan. Connecting o the network is fine now. Also, FWIW, I would like to say I enjoy the robot as it is NOT plug and play, it has a well paced learning curve and a little bit of problem solving is half the fun:)