retropie-v3.0rc1 no wifi with panda adapter

[mylt1]

i finally give up and come to you all for help. i have a RPi2 with a Panda 300mbs USB wifi adapter. the adapter works just fine with openelec but when i switch to retropie V3 the pi doesnt power the panda on. i did get it to work one time and for the life of me i dont know what i changed. i can unplug the adapter and when i plug it back in the blue LED flashes for a split second then nothing. littlerly, for the last week(starting last sunday night) i have searched for fixes on here, youtube, google and bing. i have tried everything i can find with no change. i have tried 2.6 as well. i cant remember how many times i have formatted this card, reinstalled retropie and started all over from the beginning. at this point all i dream about is command line and sudo. the only internet connection i have is my cell phone as a hotspot. i have watched hours of youtube and read more pages and post on the web than i care to admit to. so please, does anyone have any idea on what is going on?

[herbfargus]

Have you tried the setting under interfaces wireless-power off? That’s the only thing I can think of short of either your dongle going to pot or not getting enough power and needing a powered USB hub. See method two on this page:

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Setting-Up-Wifi

[mylt1]

tried that, more than once. LOL. it the Panda works just fine with openelec though. i even think i tried it on my powered USB hub but i will try it again tomorrow when i get off duty. i wonder if i bring the Pi to work and hook it up to a Ethernet cable and update all the packages if that might fix it?

[herbfargus]

That may be possible. Openelec may have different drivers installed that work with your dongle that maybe retropie doesn’t have by default. It would be the simplest answer if you know it is functioning on the same exact hardware- Occam’s razor says it has to be the software.

[petrockblog]

openelec != raspbian

openelec include their own kernel and 3rd party drivers etc.

I would search how to get your wifi up and running on raspbian (as this not related to retropie).

[mylt1]

oh, and its not creating the file structure when you plug in a USB thumbdrive either.

disregard, finally after attempt # 3 it created it.

[mylt1]

would wicd-curses have anything to do with why its not connecting to the Panda?

[herbfargus]

It is possible but perhaps unlikely. If you wish to remove any doubt you can remove wicd-curses with sudo apt-get remove wicd-curses and then just set the configs manually in interfaces.

[mylt1]

when i try to use the “configure wifi” under retropie tab i get “did not find needed package(s): wicd-curses. i am trying to install now.” and then nothing but ERR’s. thats why i am wondering if getting this think to a wired connection so it can update everything will fix the issue.

[herbfargus]

A wired connection would help. You don’t even have wicd-curses installed which is why it gives you the error- its trying to install it but you’re not connected to the internet. Have you tried connecting with wicd-curses- it can make things a bit easier at times. (Granted you’ll need a wired connection to install it first.)

[mylt1]

i am going to take everything with me to work tomorrow so i have access to a ethernet connection. i gave up on it for today since i came home today to find out the SD card was missing for my openelec. found that in the vacuum cleaner broken into at least 4 different pieces so this evening has been trying to get that back up and running. i will report back about what happens after i get this thing hooked up to a wired connection.

[herbfargus]

well just to confuse you even more we just replaced wicd-curses in the code with a simple wifi script that doesn’t cause the same cpu scaling issues. if you update you setup script you can use the wifi script under the setup option- or you can just wait a bit until 3.0 stable is released sometime soonish and do a fresh build from there and the wifi option will be in the retropie menu in emulationstation.

[mylt1]

hooking it up to ethernet fixed it. now able to run wifi. only issue now is i have no background. it is now just a white screen with black words on the main menu. not sure what happened but at least i can now connect so not worried about that as much.

[herbfargus]

How many emulators do you have on your system? It will do that if you have a lot of emulators- its a bug with emulationstation/RPI not having enough processing power.

[mylt1]

only one i have games for in the pi right now is the SNES. i updated all of them when i first hooked up to the interwebs.

[herbfargus]

That’s odd. Sometimes its get weird with updates. You could try a full binary install and see if that fixes it… May want to make a backup first just in case.

[mylt1]

it happened after i did the binary update i believe. i did a bunch of updates at one time so its hard to say which caused it. i may just do a wipe of the SD card and start over. i still have another 8.5 hours of access to the ethernet. LOL. i dont get off duty till 8am.

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