9 ms·

Raspberry Pi WLAN setup

167 points by DoubleMalt 8y ago

blensor 8y ago
That is something that seems really useful. You can get your Raspberry Pi online without a minitor but it's always a bit like stumbling in the dark. I'll definitely give this a try.
tdewitt 8y ago
I have half a dozen Pis to reimage right now, so this is timely. Can't wait to give it a shot today.
- mirceal 8y ago
  Have a look at my project: https://cattlepi.com/ https://cattlepi.com/ It gives you the ability to basically control what your Pi does (provisioning included) via an API.
yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
So GUI and displaying the IP at the end is nice. But. I do wonder: If you already have to write a special image, why not just write the network config directly to wpa_supplicant.conf?
- evan_ 8y ago
  Maybe if you’re going into an environment where you don’t know the wireless details ahead of time?
- giarc 8y ago
  As evan__10 said, if you don't know the details ahead of time. I own a company and we are currently developing a hardware tool for attendance tracking at child care centres. We use the Pi and our plans for shipping these things was to ask our customer what their SSID and password were ahead of time and hard code them in. This tool could solve our problem. Additionally, if the user changes their SSID or password at any time, the Pi won't be able to connect. We use a tool called Dataplicity to remote into the Pi and could change the password ahead of time, however if the user changes the password before we can do that, we lose all ability to connect to the unit.
  - namibj 8y ago
    Did you consider adding a password-changing webapp that connects via a smartphone's headphone jack? Or maybe even just with a _cheap_ piezo for bidirectional beeping to a smartphone? Consider the equalizer commonly used in the output path of a smartphone, but there should be existing work you might be able to build on.
swinglock 8y ago
That looks useful. Does it delete itself and the extra repo configuration after setup? If not, while convenient I'm not convinced the increased attack surface is worth it.
- sneak 8y ago
  This small patch of mine to raspbian may be useful for you, then: https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen/pull/207 https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen/pull/207 The minor downside is that you have to build the image yourself, but fortunately that is a single command once docked is installed.
  - swinglock 8y ago
    I must say it's silly we can't be trusted with a simple way to drop in a shell script on the SD card that runs at boot as root in rasbian. I don't even understand the idea that it could be bad for newbies to maybe mess up. The whole point of the RPi was to give students a small, cheap, easy to repair computer with low-level features to learn with.
    - sneak 8y ago
      Yeah, the project is sort of a mess maintainer-wise, but at least it is straightforward to modify/rebuild.
noja 8y ago
or create /boot/wpa_supplicant.conf and touch /boot/ssh and it will do the right thing on boot.
- Uehreka 8y ago
  Can you seriously put wpa_supplicant.conf in /boot and it’ll work? I have honestly never heard this in 2 years of doing Raspberry Pi, after looking at tons of documentation and web sites. This wouldn’t surprise me, but I feel like it should be much better documented, given that it’s pretty much the first and biggest hurdle to getting things to work on a new image.
  - noja 8y ago
    since 2016: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/10251/prepare-sd-card-for-wifi-on-headless-pi https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/10251/prepar...
  - tfolbrecht 8y ago
    Not in /boot, but the boot partition of the device named "boot".
    - kingosticks 8y ago
      That is mounted at /boot....
      - tfolbrecht 8y ago
        Just wanted to specify. If you put the wpa_supplicant in /boot under the root partition, it won't work :^)
        kingosticks 8y ago
        Hehe OK, I'd imagine that would be very confusing when it didn't work.
  - 8y ago
orblivion 8y ago
I'm confused by the Bluetooth logo.
- tyingq 8y ago
  There's an explanation of why bluetooth is used here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=223380 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=223380
  - gregmac 8y ago
    It's an interesting way to do it, but I would personally prefer wifi-based: * Allows usage from laptops * No app to install This could be integrated to several stock pi images from other projects, and I think that's where this really has potential. There's WiFiManager [1] for the esp8266, but this is the first time I came across something similar for the pi. [1] https://github.com/tzapu/WiFiManager https://github.com/tzapu/WiFiManager
  - orblivion 8y ago
    I don't recall my RasPis having Bluetooth built in. Maybe it's the newer models. Just saying perhaps including the word "Bluetooth" once in the description would help. Looking at this page the first time it wasn't so obvious what was going on or what it does.
    - Nullabillity 8y ago
      Bluetooth is built in from the RPi 3, the same model that also integrated WLAN.
    - NPChar 8y ago
      'Pi Zero W' and 'Pi 3 B+' have both wifi and bluetooth.
    - tyingq 8y ago
      It's the model 3's and the Zero W that have Bluetooth. Models 2 or below, and the "non W" Zero don't have it.
matthewmacleod 8y ago
That’s cool, and the UI is nice! I wrote exactly the same thing as a library, to allow user setup of the WiFi network from within an app as part of a hardware prototype - main difference being it was just a Go daemon running on the Pi. Didn’t end up using it or open-sourcing it but I will re-visit that, since it looks like there are a couple of use-cases.
- dastx 8y ago
  Please do let us know if you end up open sourcing it.
aqurai 8y ago
This is awesome! Is the OP the author? Just started using rpi with my underwater robots. Obviously the wifi cuts off when they dive, but doesn't reconnect always when they come back. Will definitely try this out.
johnklos 8y ago
The overlap of people who might want to ssh and people who don't know how to configure their own wireless doesn't seem all that large. On the other hand, I could see this being useful as an additional software package that gets run when the Pi can't find or join its usual network.
- Damogran6 8y ago
  My hassle is usually: Where do I dig up that keyboard and spare HDMI video source to bootstrap the Pi. Currently the MAME cabinet does that well, but not everyone has a MAME cabinet.
  - avip 8y ago
    You don’t. You just enable ssh and connect it to network. Essentially ‘touch /boot/ssh’
    - azinman2 8y ago
      But you can’t do that from a raspbian image, and if you want me to mod my file system post install that only works assuming I can mount it (eg I have another Linux box with keyboard). I’ve had this problem multiple times and find this approach really nice (and wish it shipped with raspbian!)
      - kingosticks 8y ago
        /boot is a fat partition. You can mount that from most OSs. Edit: forgive me, I see that's not what you meant at all. Or maybe it was? Either way, the point is valid.
      - otachack 8y ago
        But where was the SD card flashed? I think the idea is to enable ssh right after flashing the image.
        8y ago
fpgaminer 8y ago
I'm building a gift for someone else that uses a RasPi internally, and thus needed a user friendly way for them to configure its WiFi connection. It's been ... quite the adventure (mostly because I'm dumb). My first idea was to put an OLED and a rotary encoder on the box. That way they can do a special dance on the button to enter setup mode, scroll through a list of wifi networks, and then tediously scroll through letters to enter the wifi password. I found a 1" OLED for cheap, and already needed a button for other things, so this was a cheap, effective solution. But having to tediously type out a password with a knob sounded very user unfriendly. Then I realized I could bring out a USB port, and they could plug in a USB keyboard! So I worked on that for bit. It's a lot easier to use. And the whole keyboard + tiny OLED idea was kinda fun. But then I remembered the idea of doing a WiFi AP dance. That's where the device broadcasts as an AP, you connect with your phone, browse to a webpage to tell the device your Wifi network's info, and done! It's a solution that doesn't require an OLED or for me to bring out a USB connection. Cheaper and less mechanical engineering. To that end I found Mozilla's IoT project which, conveniently, has RasPi compatible code for doing just that dance: https://github.com/mozilla-iot/gateway-wifi-setup https://github.com/mozilla-iot/gateway-wifi-setup (By the way, Mozilla's IoT project is neat and worth checking out). That setup is quite similar to OP, except it doesn't require a separate app. Its downside is requiring the user to mess with the wifi settings on their phone. Not a huge deal (for my target audience) but can be annoying. (Hence why OP's project uses the Bluetooth connection; Smart!) I've been tinkering with this on and off for about two weeks. While I wasn't thrilled with the solution, it was at least usable, cheap, and easy. ... then I realized I was dumb. I have a camera on the device. I could just have them go to a website, punch in their wifi info, encode that as a QR code, and have them show it to the camera... (It'd be a secure website I set up, so no security hygiene problems). Same benefits of being cheap and easy, while being easier to use. Using `pyzbar` to do real-time QR detection I had something working within an hour. Just hold your phone in front of the camera and it'll automatically detect, decode, and setup the wifi settings. The only downside to this approach is that I can't conveniently display a list of nearby wifi networks; so they have to type their SSID manually. Figured I'd share my comedy of errors in case someone is looking for ideas for wifi setup solutions. Obviously if you're just setting up a RasPi yourself it's easier to just pop a wpa_supplicant.conf on the SD card. (Though I wish Raspbian also had a way to configure hostname, authorized_keys, and disable ssh password authentication through boot files. Only way to do that today is by mounting the root filesystem which isn't convenient on, e.g., a Mac)
blumomo 8y ago
In a previous company we built a Bluetooth Low Energy server app into the embedded Raspberry Pi-like system. Long story short: 1. RPi broadcasts via BLE the wifi networks it can see 2. A ReactNative App lets the user choose the wifi network to connect to, pre-selected is the wifi network which the mobile is connected to 3. User enters wifi password 4. App sends it to RPI, still via BLE 5. RPi responds with IP address when successfully connected or with an error, all via BLE. 6. App can now talk to Pi via IP 7. BLE server on Pi shuts down. Done. Advantage: user never needs to mess with changing to any ad-hoc wifi. Awesome UX.
- Fnoord 8y ago
  Hmm, using BLE to send your WPA2-PSK password? Isn't that insecure?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ploxiln 8y ago
    You probably want to encrypt it with a public key for which the raspi has the private key. You could validate the public key with a qr-code on the raspi, or some other pre-arranged scheme. This is a very similar situation to being able to access the device on the LAN over tcp/ip and needing to pass it a secret.
    - sdenton4 8y ago
      (Or just use diffie hellman to generate a symmetric key pair for communicating for the length of the session... you'd still want something to prevent MITM, but if you're not concerned about MITM attacks at session creation time, DH gets user effort down to about zero.)
  - anon4242 8y ago
    BLE has support for encrypted communication so should be ok, at least in theory.
crankysiren 8y ago
https://github.com/jasbur/RaspiWiFi https://github.com/jasbur/RaspiWiFi fairly stable light weight system that does the same thing, also comes as an etchable .img one advantage here is that if the Pi goes offline for extended period it will flip on its AP broadcast mode allowing wifi to be setup again. Code is highly modular and maintainable.
- bmc7505 8y ago
  Just out of curiosity, but why doesn't Raspberry Pi 3B support simultaneous broadcasting and receiving of Wi-Fi? I've seen multiple apps that swap between these modes (e.g. using broadcast mode to set up a captive portal) and then swapping to receiver mode, but never both at the same time. I've tried many times to configure this, all unsuccessfully. Is there some fundamental limitation with the underlying hardware that prevents this?
  - droopybuns 8y ago
    Did you try adding another wifi adapter? I’m not sure I understand your question well- seems like this is easy to resolve.
  - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
    My understanding was that this always requires an entire second wifi module? On my big expensive desktop computer, I can only ever recieve or broadcast a wifi network, never both. Unless I install an additional wifi adapter.
    - arthurfm 8y ago
      The Pixel 3/3 XL (and several other Android smartphones) can run both a hotspot and Wi-Fi simultaneously. [1] I could be wrong, but I am fairly sure these phones only have a single Wi-Fi module. [1] https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/11/03/pixel-3-3-xl-support-wi-fi-sharing-devices/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/11/03/pixel-3-3-xl-suppor...
      - 8y ago
lisper 8y ago
This looks very cool but you should think twice before you use it. If a hacker wanted to infiltrate your LAN, there would be no better way to do it than to provide a tool like this.
- callumjones 8y ago
  But this is just the process of connecting it to a wireless network, which would be the hacker's network? The risk seems pretty contrived? You could make the same argument for other assisted headless installations: speakers, smart plugs, etc.
  - lisper 8y ago
    > You could make the same argument for other assisted headless installations: speakers, smart plugs, etc. That's true, but in those devices can be isolated from the internet by a firewall. Berrylan can't be, or it loses its utility. In order to talk to the app, Berrylan has to send packets to and receive packets from the internet. Also, even after the setup, most RaspPi applications entail having the computer continue to have access to the internet. So the situation is much risker with the RaspPi.
    - callumjones 8y ago
      Doesn't this just work over Bluetooth for the initial config? The internet isn't useful at this point because it isn't connected to a WLAN.
      - lisper 8y ago
        Ah, that's a good point.
josteink 8y ago
> ETCH THE IMAGE > Download the BerryLan flavoured Raspbian image and flash the SD Card. We recommend Etcher to do that. I’m curious. Why would anyone recommend people download and run a multi-100mb electron app instead of just using dd? Especially for projects like this aimed at medium technical people.
codyb 8y ago
This seems like it would be super useful prior to Raspbian Stretch for developers using Apple products. Prior to stretch the wpa_supplicant.conf file needed to be modified in the main Raspbian partition which is inaccessible on the unix machine without setting up a virtual linux box and creating a vb disk image linked to the sd card. It was a bit of a pain. With Stretch you can just add a wpa_supplicant.conf file and an empty ssh file to the boot partition which is accessible and you should be ready to go. This still solves the pain point of there being lots of outdated headless instructions out there telling you to modify wpa_supplicant.conf in /etc/wpa_supplicant on the main partition. Would have saved me a ton of time that's for sure! Looks nice and clean as well, design wise.
epynonymous 8y ago
403 for me, i’m in shanghai. but reading the comments, i think i know where you’re going with this. one question i have is, if you have a lot of devices in the same area, how do you make certain the ip address space doesnt collide?
rgoodwintx 8y ago
Funny enough, I've been about to embark on something similar, for a project I contribute to that makes a Raspi Zero W into a "smart USB drive" for the built-in Tesla dashcam: https://github.com/cimryan/teslausb https://github.com/cimryan/teslausb (Props to Cim and Ray who are doing a ton of work making the project go, also!) The goals/advantages, vs just using a USB thumb drive: - will connect to your wifi network (when detected) and copy off your saved dashcam files (over CIFS, SSH, others) - fixes any FAT filesystem errors on the virtual USB drive (presented to the host using g_mass_storage) automatically; some Tesla software versions had/have a bug that left the filesystem dirty on shutdown, rendering some thumb drives unreadable until formatted again - (in process testing) uses BTRFS to keep the drive online while taking snapshots to do the file copies (and other neat things I have planned, like extending the 1-hour rolling buffer that Tesla uses by copying off files older than 1 hr into a secondary backing store on disk to be copied off later) - automated (headless) setup by putting a configuration file in /boot (including wifi setup) - quite a few more ideas to come; love to hear more brainstorms too. Maybe with a little more work it's worth its own Show HN? :) I've learned a lot about how little I remembered about bash, how Raspbian images are built, setting up Jenkins for automated builds, even controlling the LED on the Pi to show progress of headless setup. (Sometimes it's the little things...) On the to-do list was something exactly like this post: provide a way to get to the files if you are away from your home network, and/or don't have a computer with a USB or SD reader handy. Say, if you had just gotten in an accident and wanted to get to the files pronto. So, a way to trigger the Pi popping into AP mode was my next area of exploration; timely! I was actually exploring having your phone make a BT connection that would cause the host to switch configs (either automatically, or using BT PAN. (And a web UI to grab files, make settings changes, etc.) Good thoughts on security in some of the comments, and glad to see others have thought through this. Thanks to OP and others; I think there's a solution one way or another in several of these project ideas! And, as customary, PR's welcome :)
syntaxing 8y ago
Super cool! That being said, Raspbian latest update have been killing my wifi cards...for some reason none of my old realtek usb wifi dongle works anymore. I had to flash one of the older images (June). Anyone else have this problem?
berti 8y ago
Even if you couldn't mount the boot partition on any common desktop OS and setup ssh + wpa_supplicant (it's FAT32), I would greatly prefer the simplicity of a local console session with a $2 USB-serial adapter (am I the only weirdo with dozens of these lying around?). Typically I actually just mount the partitions and chroot with qemu-arm, upgrade packages, and do all of the setup before the SD card is ever inserted in a real Pi. proot[0] makes all this a walk in the park. mount /dev/sdX2 /mnt mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt/boot proot -q qemu-arm -S /mnt [0] https://proot-me.github.io https://proot-me.github.io
charliebrownau 8y ago
Great another fucking mobile app How the heck did we manage to use tech and computers before spy phone apps
basdp 8y ago
you can just put a wpa_supplicant.conf file on the USB stick partition and it will automatically connect to your wifi[1]. This seems like an overengineered approach that is far more complicated... [1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/wireless-cli.md https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wire...

167 points by DoubleMalt 8y ago

That is something that seems really useful. You can get your Raspberry Pi online without a minitor but it's always a bit like stumbling in the dark. I'll definitely give this a try.

tdewitt 8y ago

I have half a dozen Pis to reimage right now, so this is timely. Can't wait to give it a shot today.

mirceal 8y ago
Have a look at my project: https://cattlepi.com/ https://cattlepi.com/ It gives you the ability to basically control what your Pi does (provisioning included) via an API.

yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago

So GUI and displaying the IP at the end is nice. But. I do wonder: If you already have to write a special image, why not just write the network config directly to wpa_supplicant.conf?

evan_ 8y ago
Maybe if you’re going into an environment where you don’t know the wireless details ahead of time?
giarc 8y ago
As evan__10 said, if you don't know the details ahead of time. I own a company and we are currently developing a hardware tool for attendance tracking at child care centres. We use the Pi and our plans for shipping these things was to ask our customer what their SSID and password were ahead of time and hard code them in. This tool could solve our problem. Additionally, if the user changes their SSID or password at any time, the Pi won't be able to connect. We use a tool called Dataplicity to remote into the Pi and could change the password ahead of time, however if the user changes the password before we can do that, we lose all ability to connect to the unit.
- namibj 8y ago
  Did you consider adding a password-changing webapp that connects via a smartphone's headphone jack? Or maybe even just with a _cheap_ piezo for bidirectional beeping to a smartphone? Consider the equalizer commonly used in the output path of a smartphone, but there should be existing work you might be able to build on.

swinglock 8y ago

That looks useful. Does it delete itself and the extra repo configuration after setup? If not, while convenient I'm not convinced the increased attack surface is worth it.

sneak 8y ago
This small patch of mine to raspbian may be useful for you, then: https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen/pull/207 https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen/pull/207 The minor downside is that you have to build the image yourself, but fortunately that is a single command once docked is installed.
- swinglock 8y ago
  I must say it's silly we can't be trusted with a simple way to drop in a shell script on the SD card that runs at boot as root in rasbian. I don't even understand the idea that it could be bad for newbies to maybe mess up. The whole point of the RPi was to give students a small, cheap, easy to repair computer with low-level features to learn with.
  - sneak 8y ago
    Yeah, the project is sort of a mess maintainer-wise, but at least it is straightforward to modify/rebuild.

noja 8y ago

or create /boot/wpa_supplicant.conf and touch /boot/ssh and it will do the right thing on boot.

Uehreka 8y ago
Can you seriously put wpa_supplicant.conf in /boot and it’ll work? I have honestly never heard this in 2 years of doing Raspberry Pi, after looking at tons of documentation and web sites. This wouldn’t surprise me, but I feel like it should be much better documented, given that it’s pretty much the first and biggest hurdle to getting things to work on a new image.
- noja 8y ago
  since 2016: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/10251/prepare-sd-card-for-wifi-on-headless-pi https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/10251/prepar...
- tfolbrecht 8y ago
  Not in /boot, but the boot partition of the device named "boot".
  - kingosticks 8y ago
    That is mounted at /boot....
    - tfolbrecht 8y ago
      Just wanted to specify. If you put the wpa_supplicant in /boot under the root partition, it won't work :^)
      - kingosticks 8y ago
        Hehe OK, I'd imagine that would be very confusing when it didn't work.
- 8y ago

orblivion 8y ago

I'm confused by the Bluetooth logo.

tyingq 8y ago
There's an explanation of why bluetooth is used here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=223380 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=223380
- gregmac 8y ago
  It's an interesting way to do it, but I would personally prefer wifi-based: * Allows usage from laptops * No app to install This could be integrated to several stock pi images from other projects, and I think that's where this really has potential. There's WiFiManager [1] for the esp8266, but this is the first time I came across something similar for the pi. [1] https://github.com/tzapu/WiFiManager https://github.com/tzapu/WiFiManager
- orblivion 8y ago
  I don't recall my RasPis having Bluetooth built in. Maybe it's the newer models. Just saying perhaps including the word "Bluetooth" once in the description would help. Looking at this page the first time it wasn't so obvious what was going on or what it does.
  - Nullabillity 8y ago
    Bluetooth is built in from the RPi 3, the same model that also integrated WLAN.
  - NPChar 8y ago
    'Pi Zero W' and 'Pi 3 B+' have both wifi and bluetooth.
  - tyingq 8y ago
    It's the model 3's and the Zero W that have Bluetooth. Models 2 or below, and the "non W" Zero don't have it.

matthewmacleod 8y ago

That’s cool, and the UI is nice! I wrote exactly the same thing as a library, to allow user setup of the WiFi network from within an app as part of a hardware prototype - main difference being it was just a Go daemon running on the Pi. Didn’t end up using it or open-sourcing it but I will re-visit that, since it looks like there are a couple of use-cases.

dastx 8y ago
Please do let us know if you end up open sourcing it.

aqurai 8y ago

This is awesome! Is the OP the author? Just started using rpi with my underwater robots. Obviously the wifi cuts off when they dive, but doesn't reconnect always when they come back. Will definitely try this out.

johnklos 8y ago

The overlap of people who might want to ssh and people who don't know how to configure their own wireless doesn't seem all that large. On the other hand, I could see this being useful as an additional software package that gets run when the Pi can't find or join its usual network.

Damogran6 8y ago
My hassle is usually: Where do I dig up that keyboard and spare HDMI video source to bootstrap the Pi. Currently the MAME cabinet does that well, but not everyone has a MAME cabinet.
- avip 8y ago
  You don’t. You just enable ssh and connect it to network. Essentially ‘touch /boot/ssh’
  - azinman2 8y ago
    But you can’t do that from a raspbian image, and if you want me to mod my file system post install that only works assuming I can mount it (eg I have another Linux box with keyboard). I’ve had this problem multiple times and find this approach really nice (and wish it shipped with raspbian!)
    - kingosticks 8y ago
      /boot is a fat partition. You can mount that from most OSs. Edit: forgive me, I see that's not what you meant at all. Or maybe it was? Either way, the point is valid.
    - otachack 8y ago
      But where was the SD card flashed? I think the idea is to enable ssh right after flashing the image.
      - 8y ago

fpgaminer 8y ago

I'm building a gift for someone else that uses a RasPi internally, and thus needed a user friendly way for them to configure its WiFi connection. It's been ... quite the adventure (mostly because I'm dumb). My first idea was to put an OLED and a rotary encoder on the box. That way they can do a special dance on the button to enter setup mode, scroll through a list of wifi networks, and then tediously scroll through letters to enter the wifi password. I found a 1" OLED for cheap, and already needed a button for other things, so this was a cheap, effective solution. But having to tediously type out a password with a knob sounded very user unfriendly. Then I realized I could bring out a USB port, and they could plug in a USB keyboard! So I worked on that for bit. It's a lot easier to use. And the whole keyboard + tiny OLED idea was kinda fun. But then I remembered the idea of doing a WiFi AP dance. That's where the device broadcasts as an AP, you connect with your phone, browse to a webpage to tell the device your Wifi network's info, and done! It's a solution that doesn't require an OLED or for me to bring out a USB connection. Cheaper and less mechanical engineering. To that end I found Mozilla's IoT project which, conveniently, has RasPi compatible code for doing just that dance: https://github.com/mozilla-iot/gateway-wifi-setup https://github.com/mozilla-iot/gateway-wifi-setup (By the way, Mozilla's IoT project is neat and worth checking out). That setup is quite similar to OP, except it doesn't require a separate app. Its downside is requiring the user to mess with the wifi settings on their phone. Not a huge deal (for my target audience) but can be annoying. (Hence why OP's project uses the Bluetooth connection; Smart!) I've been tinkering with this on and off for about two weeks. While I wasn't thrilled with the solution, it was at least usable, cheap, and easy. ... then I realized I was dumb. I have a camera on the device. I could just have them go to a website, punch in their wifi info, encode that as a QR code, and have them show it to the camera... (It'd be a secure website I set up, so no security hygiene problems). Same benefits of being cheap and easy, while being easier to use. Using `pyzbar` to do real-time QR detection I had something working within an hour. Just hold your phone in front of the camera and it'll automatically detect, decode, and setup the wifi settings. The only downside to this approach is that I can't conveniently display a list of nearby wifi networks; so they have to type their SSID manually. Figured I'd share my comedy of errors in case someone is looking for ideas for wifi setup solutions. Obviously if you're just setting up a RasPi yourself it's easier to just pop a wpa_supplicant.conf on the SD card. (Though I wish Raspbian also had a way to configure hostname, authorized_keys, and disable ssh password authentication through boot files. Only way to do that today is by mounting the root filesystem which isn't convenient on, e.g., a Mac)

blumomo 8y ago

In a previous company we built a Bluetooth Low Energy server app into the embedded Raspberry Pi-like system. Long story short: 1. RPi broadcasts via BLE the wifi networks it can see 2. A ReactNative App lets the user choose the wifi network to connect to, pre-selected is the wifi network which the mobile is connected to 3. User enters wifi password 4. App sends it to RPI, still via BLE 5. RPi responds with IP address when successfully connected or with an error, all via BLE. 6. App can now talk to Pi via IP 7. BLE server on Pi shuts down. Done. Advantage: user never needs to mess with changing to any ad-hoc wifi. Awesome UX.

Fnoord 8y ago
Hmm, using BLE to send your WPA2-PSK password? Isn't that insecure?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ploxiln 8y ago
  You probably want to encrypt it with a public key for which the raspi has the private key. You could validate the public key with a qr-code on the raspi, or some other pre-arranged scheme. This is a very similar situation to being able to access the device on the LAN over tcp/ip and needing to pass it a secret.
  - sdenton4 8y ago
    (Or just use diffie hellman to generate a symmetric key pair for communicating for the length of the session... you'd still want something to prevent MITM, but if you're not concerned about MITM attacks at session creation time, DH gets user effort down to about zero.)
- anon4242 8y ago
  BLE has support for encrypted communication so should be ok, at least in theory.

crankysiren 8y ago

https://github.com/jasbur/RaspiWiFi https://github.com/jasbur/RaspiWiFi fairly stable light weight system that does the same thing, also comes as an etchable .img one advantage here is that if the Pi goes offline for extended period it will flip on its AP broadcast mode allowing wifi to be setup again. Code is highly modular and maintainable.

bmc7505 8y ago
Just out of curiosity, but why doesn't Raspberry Pi 3B support simultaneous broadcasting and receiving of Wi-Fi? I've seen multiple apps that swap between these modes (e.g. using broadcast mode to set up a captive portal) and then swapping to receiver mode, but never both at the same time. I've tried many times to configure this, all unsuccessfully. Is there some fundamental limitation with the underlying hardware that prevents this?
- droopybuns 8y ago
  Did you try adding another wifi adapter? I’m not sure I understand your question well- seems like this is easy to resolve.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  My understanding was that this always requires an entire second wifi module? On my big expensive desktop computer, I can only ever recieve or broadcast a wifi network, never both. Unless I install an additional wifi adapter.
  - arthurfm 8y ago
    The Pixel 3/3 XL (and several other Android smartphones) can run both a hotspot and Wi-Fi simultaneously. [1] I could be wrong, but I am fairly sure these phones only have a single Wi-Fi module. [1] https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/11/03/pixel-3-3-xl-support-wi-fi-sharing-devices/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/11/03/pixel-3-3-xl-suppor...
    - 8y ago

lisper 8y ago

This looks very cool but you should think twice before you use it. If a hacker wanted to infiltrate your LAN, there would be no better way to do it than to provide a tool like this.

callumjones 8y ago
But this is just the process of connecting it to a wireless network, which would be the hacker's network? The risk seems pretty contrived? You could make the same argument for other assisted headless installations: speakers, smart plugs, etc.
- lisper 8y ago
  > You could make the same argument for other assisted headless installations: speakers, smart plugs, etc. That's true, but in those devices can be isolated from the internet by a firewall. Berrylan can't be, or it loses its utility. In order to talk to the app, Berrylan has to send packets to and receive packets from the internet. Also, even after the setup, most RaspPi applications entail having the computer continue to have access to the internet. So the situation is much risker with the RaspPi.
  - callumjones 8y ago
    Doesn't this just work over Bluetooth for the initial config? The internet isn't useful at this point because it isn't connected to a WLAN.
    - lisper 8y ago
      Ah, that's a good point.

josteink 8y ago

> ETCH THE IMAGE > Download the BerryLan flavoured Raspbian image and flash the SD Card. We recommend Etcher to do that. I’m curious. Why would anyone recommend people download and run a multi-100mb electron app instead of just using dd? Especially for projects like this aimed at medium technical people.

codyb 8y ago

This seems like it would be super useful prior to Raspbian Stretch for developers using Apple products. Prior to stretch the wpa_supplicant.conf file needed to be modified in the main Raspbian partition which is inaccessible on the unix machine without setting up a virtual linux box and creating a vb disk image linked to the sd card. It was a bit of a pain. With Stretch you can just add a wpa_supplicant.conf file and an empty ssh file to the boot partition which is accessible and you should be ready to go. This still solves the pain point of there being lots of outdated headless instructions out there telling you to modify wpa_supplicant.conf in /etc/wpa_supplicant on the main partition. Would have saved me a ton of time that's for sure! Looks nice and clean as well, design wise.

epynonymous 8y ago

403 for me, i’m in shanghai. but reading the comments, i think i know where you’re going with this. one question i have is, if you have a lot of devices in the same area, how do you make certain the ip address space doesnt collide?

rgoodwintx 8y ago

Funny enough, I've been about to embark on something similar, for a project I contribute to that makes a Raspi Zero W into a "smart USB drive" for the built-in Tesla dashcam: https://github.com/cimryan/teslausb https://github.com/cimryan/teslausb (Props to Cim and Ray who are doing a ton of work making the project go, also!) The goals/advantages, vs just using a USB thumb drive: - will connect to your wifi network (when detected) and copy off your saved dashcam files (over CIFS, SSH, others) - fixes any FAT filesystem errors on the virtual USB drive (presented to the host using g_mass_storage) automatically; some Tesla software versions had/have a bug that left the filesystem dirty on shutdown, rendering some thumb drives unreadable until formatted again - (in process testing) uses BTRFS to keep the drive online while taking snapshots to do the file copies (and other neat things I have planned, like extending the 1-hour rolling buffer that Tesla uses by copying off files older than 1 hr into a secondary backing store on disk to be copied off later) - automated (headless) setup by putting a configuration file in /boot (including wifi setup) - quite a few more ideas to come; love to hear more brainstorms too. Maybe with a little more work it's worth its own Show HN? :) I've learned a lot about how little I remembered about bash, how Raspbian images are built, setting up Jenkins for automated builds, even controlling the LED on the Pi to show progress of headless setup. (Sometimes it's the little things...) On the to-do list was something exactly like this post: provide a way to get to the files if you are away from your home network, and/or don't have a computer with a USB or SD reader handy. Say, if you had just gotten in an accident and wanted to get to the files pronto. So, a way to trigger the Pi popping into AP mode was my next area of exploration; timely! I was actually exploring having your phone make a BT connection that would cause the host to switch configs (either automatically, or using BT PAN. (And a web UI to grab files, make settings changes, etc.) Good thoughts on security in some of the comments, and glad to see others have thought through this. Thanks to OP and others; I think there's a solution one way or another in several of these project ideas! And, as customary, PR's welcome :)

syntaxing 8y ago

Super cool! That being said, Raspbian latest update have been killing my wifi cards...for some reason none of my old realtek usb wifi dongle works anymore. I had to flash one of the older images (June). Anyone else have this problem?

berti 8y ago

Even if you couldn't mount the boot partition on any common desktop OS and setup ssh + wpa_supplicant (it's FAT32), I would greatly prefer the simplicity of a local console session with a $2 USB-serial adapter (am I the only weirdo with dozens of these lying around?). Typically I actually just mount the partitions and chroot with qemu-arm, upgrade packages, and do all of the setup before the SD card is ever inserted in a real Pi. proot[0] makes all this a walk in the park. mount /dev/sdX2 /mnt mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt/boot proot -q qemu-arm -S /mnt [0] https://proot-me.github.io https://proot-me.github.io

charliebrownau 8y ago

Great another fucking mobile app How the heck did we manage to use tech and computers before spy phone apps

basdp 8y ago

you can just put a wpa_supplicant.conf file on the USB stick partition and it will automatically connect to your wifi[1]. This seems like an overengineered approach that is far more complicated... [1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/wireless-cli.md https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wire...