Reply To: Raspberry Pi wi-fi dongle going to sleep?

[RonRN18]

I have just built an OpenSprinkler controller to give to my father for Christmas and I’m currently trying to trouble-shoot any potential problems before I give it to him and install it for him. I have not had the problem you have mentioned, but want to see if we did anything different from each other. Just to mention what I have done, I started off with the latest Raspberry Pi 2 and the latest OpenSprinkler Pi (Plus). I then installed the Raspbian Jessie. I have performed sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get dist-upgrade and sudo rpi-update. If I now type inuname –a, I getLinux OpenSprinkler 4.1.13-v7+ #826 SMP PREEMPT Fri Nov 13 20:19:03 GMT 2015 armv7l GNU/Linux. I then went into my~/Downloadsdirectory and did agit clone https://github.com/OpenSprinkler/OpenSprinkler-Firmware.gitfollowed by./build.sh ospi.

For WiFi, I’m using a Etekcity® AR5 USB WiFi dongle I purchased a year or so ago. This was my first time setting up wifi from command-line on a Raspberry Pi so I followed the instructions at https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/wireless-cli.md. To make matters more confusing, the security of MY home network uses a Radius server for WPA2, requiring both a username and password instead of the typical passphrase. This meant that I had to add the following to my /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf file:

network={
  ssid="MYSSID"
  scan_ssid=1
  key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
  pairwise=CCMP TKIP
  group=CCMP TKIP
  eap=PEAP
  identity="MYUSERNAME"
  password="MYPASSWORD"
  id_str="MYHOME"
  }

network={
    ssid="DADS SSID"
    psk="DADS Passphrase"
    id_str="Dad"
}

With this setup, everything appears to be working the way it is supposed to. The reason I am making this for my father is he has a HUGE garden. When I was at his place last, I saw 4 cheap sprinkler controllers with each showing a different time. I could tell that each of them were kind of difficult to program and none of the zones were labeled, meaning he just had to know what valve was controlled by what zone number by what controller. With this OpenSprinkler, he will be able to have one simple to program controller that he can label each zone for what it is.

I currently have one based on the BeagleBone Black… if I were to do it again, I’d definitely go Raspberry Pi. I only have two zones at my house but I did it primarily for weather-based watering. I also ran Ethernet cabling to my controller so Wi-Fi was a non-issue.