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Wi-Fi and Bluetooth USB dongles for Raspberry Pi 1 model B

2016-01-31

I wanted to expand my Raspberry Pi with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities. For this task I bought two cheap USB dongles on the AliExpress website. An 802.11n Wi-Fi dongle with Realtek's RTL8188EUS chipset and an USB Bluetooth adapter compatible with Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode) adapter.

Both of these devices can be used with the latest version of Raspbian. Check out list of Raspberry compilant hardware:

  • http://elinux.org/RPi_USB_Wi-Fi_Adapters
  • http://elinux.org/RPi_USB_Bluetooth_adapters

First of all I had to upgrade Raspbian to the latest version.

$ rpi-update

# Check out Raspbian's version
$ uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 4.1.16+ #833 Wed Jan 27 14:29:11 GMT 2016 armv61 GNU/Linux

$ sudo apt-get update & sudo apt-get upgrade

After upgrading I checked connected hardware:

$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 004 ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)
Bus 001 Device 005 ID 0bda:0179 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.

Then I configured configured connection to my Wi-Fi router guided by Oliver's article.

#/etc/wpa.config
network={
    ssid="<ssid>"
    proto=RSM
    key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
    pairwise=CCMP TKIP
    group=CCMP TKIP
    psk="<password>"
}

#/etc/network/interfaces
allow-hotplug wlan0
auto wlan0

iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-conf /etc/wpa.config

Wi-Fi started working on reboot of Raspbian.

Installation of Bluetooth keyboard was quite easy as well. I followed steps described in Tyler's article. First I've installed bluetooth support into my Raspbian and then connected wireless keyboard via bluez tools.

# To scan nearby Bluetooth hardware ready to be paired
$ hcitool scan
Scanning ...
  7C:1E:52:AA:0B:E3 Microsoft Sculpt Wireless Keyboard
# To connect keyboard and to 
$ sudo bluez-simple-agent hci0 7C:1E:52:AA:0B:E3
$ sudo bluez-test-device trusted 7C:1E:52:AA:0B:E3 yes 
$ sudo bluez-test-input connect 7C:1E:52:AA:0B:E3