How to get Raspberry Pi to work with TP-Link TL-WN721N USB Wi-Fi adapter

Wow! It’s taken me over a week to find just the right combo of advice from a number of really helpful blogs to help me setup raspberryfai with mt TP-Link TL-WN721N USB WiFi adapter. I tried so many different steps that I couldn’t remember what I’d done. I thought that the wicd-curses utility would work like a charm but it hung my RasPi a few times.

Now that it’s setup, I shall call it raspberrywifai. 🙂

The blog which was most helpful was this post written almost 2 years ago. Just follow the steps especially on how to get the firmware for the TP-Link USB adapter. The only exception was that the following command didn’t work in my case,

pre-up wpa_supplicant -Dwext -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -B

Instead I just have to change it to the simpler form of (my wpa_supplicant.conf file is kept in its own folder):

wpa_conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

In order to get the psk value, you can’t just type in your WPA2 passphrase, you need to run the following command:

sudo wpa_passphrase ssid passphrase

To be sure that it is indeed connected and seen as a USB device on my RasPi, I run lsusb, a command I learned from  this post.

Now that raspberryfai has become raspberrywifai, I can bring it out for a spin this weekend.

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