Wednesday, October 17, 2012

How to Find the Hardware Version of Your Raspberry Pi

You're probably wondering what Raspberry Pi hardware version you currently own. Provided you have accessed your Raspberry Pi, issue the following command in your terminal:
cat /proc/cpuinfo 
Reference:

http://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2012/09/checking-your-raspberry-pi-board-version/

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Installing Carl9170 Firmware on Raspberry Pi

Installing the Carl9170 firmware on a Raspberry Pi is easy. The following steps were done on the latest Raspbian "Wheezy" OS (2012-09-18-wheezy-raspbian.zip). Just ensure that you have an Internet connection and follow these steps:

  1. In your terminal, type the following command:
    wget 'http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/carl9170/fw1.9.6?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=carl9170-1.fw' -O carl9170-1.fw
  2. Then, move the firmware to the /lib/firmware directory as shown below:
    sudo mv carl9170-1.fw /lib/firmware
  3. Connect your USB WiFi device to the board. The Carl9170 should automatically be loaded. You should be able to run iwconfig on your device.

    Note: The board that I'm using is the initial version of the Raspberry Pi and I realised that if I connect my Proxim Wireless 802.11a/b/g/n USB WiFi device to a non-powered USB hub (and that hub itself is connected to the RPi), the system keeps on disconnecting and re-associating the WiFi USB device with a new phy number continuously. However, if I connect it directly, no problem is encountered except for the fact that the output for iwlist scan doesn't seem to be comprehensive (there are a lot of access points in the room broadcasting their SSIDs but all this little fella could scan for was just two or three access points).
References:

http://wiki.debian.org/carl9170 - Where I originally got the instructions for the above

http://wiki.debian.org/Modules - Automatically loading module

http://wiki.debian.org/WiFi/HowToUse - Configure WiFi interface



Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Revised 802.11 Standard

I was surfing the Net for 802.11-2007 when I stumbled across a newer revision, 802.11-2012.