Getting an IxE based Pi on your Wi Fi

Connecting your IxE to Wi-Fi

If you have downloaded and are using the IxE OS on your Raspberry Pi, you can get onto your Wi-Fi network by modifying a .txt file on the IxE SD card.

Setting your own Wi-Fi settings

We have preinstalled Adafruit Occidentalis on the IxE distribution of Linux. Along with other developer tools, this allows us to set up Wi-Fi by using a text file on the boot disk of the SD card. To set up the Wi-Fi to work on your own access point follow these steps:

If your IxE is on, power it off. Then remove the SD card from the SD slot by pressing it in. The SD card should pop out easily. Do not pull the card out with force, this will damage the SD card slot on the RPi

1. Insert the SD card into an USB adapter and plug it into your personal computer
2. When the disk is mounted you should see a drive called boot in your Finder, Explorer, or Filesystem viewer
3. Open and look inside the boot volume and find occidentals.txt
4. Open occidentalis.txt with a text editor

The file should look something like this

# hostname for your Raspberry Pi:
hostname=ixe05

# basic wireless networking options:
wifi_ssid=ChairBot
wifi_password=password

5. Change the wifi_ssid line to be the name of your access point
6. Change the wifi_password line to be the password for your access point
7. Save the file
8. Safely eject the boot disk
9. Plug the SD card back into the IxE SD slot
10. Power up the IxE and let it boot
11. Try to ping your IxE from your computer's terminal (make sure you are on the same wireless network!)

nik@Nikolass-MBP:~/Desktop$ ping ixe05.local
PING ixe-05.local (192.168.1.110): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.1.110: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=1.607 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.110: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=4.227 ms

If you get good ping messages back like above, your IxE is connected!

You can now connect to your IxE using ssh and start building your project! Password: raspberry

ssh [email protected]

Troubleshooting

1. If the IxE is not on the network, but is booted, try unplugging the Wi-Fi adapter and then plugging it back in. Sometimes when you change the settings, the new settings do not get set before the Wi-Fi adapter uses the old settings.

2. Make sure you spelled the ssid and the password correctly. These are case sensitive and one letter off will cause it to not work.

3. Make sure you ping the correct hostname.

4. Make sure the computer you are trying to connect from is one the same network as the IxE.

5. Make sure that if your Wi-Fi adapter has lights that are blinking in some pattern.