![]() ![]() Router back on – waited 5 minutes and… sure enough – absolutely NO Wi-Fi. The next test was to pull the power to the router (does anyone REALLY live in a place where none of this EVER goes wrong?). So I rebooted the Pi and back came the connection. So with everything working, To test reliability, I simply pulled the Wi-Fi dongle out – and put it back in. I did note that very occasionally the Pi Zero would reset – the cause of this was a very long, thin USB power lead – funny that this never had been a problem with the Pi2 – but shortening the lead very definitely solved the problem. But of course this is when people normally stop only to discover often days or weeks later that this is NOT a good enough solution. Plugged in the cheap USB powered adaptor – plugged the WIFI dongle into that and applied power. So I took an old-fashioned Pi B and set that up with Wi-Fi (without the hub) – copied the FLASH from its rather large original SD to a micro SD and plugged it into the Pi Zero. I also spent £5.59 in the UK on a cheap powered USB hub because article after article suggested that running the WIFI without a hub was not a good idea (since verified and further backs up my doubts about the benefit of having a Pi Zero in the first place). The little number you see here on the right was £2.59 from Hong Kong and is in keeping with the low cost of the Pi Zero. ![]() However, having had my Pi Zero sitting on the shelf for some time and having now received more than one WIFI dongle (including one with a decent external aerial) I thought I’d give it a go. Yet that is EXACTLY the scenario people will no doubt stumble onto when getting their new spiffy Pi Zero – I’m not going to say low cost because by the time you realise you need a USB hub and WIFI adaptor the price suddenly shoots up towards the cost of competing devices. ![]() ![]() I generally attach Raspberry Pi devices to the Internet via a hardwired Ethernet as connectivity is very important to me – not much point in having a super-duper setup miles away only to discover you can no longer talk to it, right? Why for example would you NOT want the Wi-Fi to reconnect on failure? What is the point? Yet, that does seem to be the default scenario, particularly odd when it comes to the Pi Zero – which has no option BUT to use WIFI. Sometimes I wonder about the thinking processes involved in Debian setup. ![]()
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