How to add WiFi capability to the RaspberryPi in 10 easy steps

After a bit of struggling, we finally managed to make the Micronext MN-WD552B USB dongle work on the RaspberryPi. I choose this dongle beacuse it’s tiny, and it was suggested by Farnell’s website. Unfortunately the driver for Realtek RTL8188CUS chipset provided with wheezy is not working so there’s a little bit of hacking to do.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to have a perfectly working WiFi RaspberryPi

  1. Buy your dongle 🙂 
  2. Download a brand new wheezy. New is always better. Download it from here. I installed the 2012-08-16-wheezy-raspbian.zip version.
  3. Install the brand new wheezy image on a brand new SD Card (or a used one, it really doesn’t matter because we are going to format it) following these instructions.
  4. Plug your raspberry to a monitor, a keyboard and an ethernet connection, power it on and login locally or via ssh
  5. Complete the initial setup of the RaspberryPi
  6. Download the fantastic python script made by MrEngman from here
  7. Manually put the old driver into the RPi’s modprobe blacklist:
    sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/raspi-blacklist.conf 
    • add this line: blacklist rtl8192cu
    • save the file
    • reboot the system: sudo reboot
  8. Exec the MrEngamn’s script:
    sudo bash install-rtl8188cus.sh
    • Follow the instructions and reboot
  9. Exec the script again, as in step 8, this will make the RPi download all the updates
    • Follow the instructions and reboot again
  10. THE END, now you finally have a 100% WiFi capable RaspberryPi!!!

I hope it will help! Bye Guys and happy prototyping!

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