I am going to jump a bit ahead with my posts to something that can be considered a bit more advanced, OCTOPRINT, only to point out an issue I had with the initial configuration the other night. OctoPrint is a 3D print server that runs on embedded systems so that you can control your 3D printer over your network, or from anywhere with an internet connection. OctoPi is the image you can download for a Raspberry Pi. There are a lot of good reasons to run this software, but I will save those for a future post. It’s also free. Until then, feel free to check out the main web page, OctoPrint.org, and see some instructions on how to set it up at OctoPrint Download. That link has a great video that Thomas Sanladerer did on initial setup and configuration.
Onto my issue. This was my first time setting up OctoPi. After installing the image onto the SD card and booting up, I could get network access with a wired connection, but I had nothing for my wireless. Following the instructions on the Download page listed above, I made sure to edit the octopi-network.txt file in the root of the SD card. Once the Raspbian desktop booted up, I did not get an icon on my desktop to configure wireless as shown in the video on the Download page. If you also do not have the WiFi configuration icon on the desktop, go to run and type in wpa_gui. This will load the GUI for WiFi configuration. Looking at ifconfig and iwconfig returned no useful information.
I was receiving two errors.
-unknown interface wlan0=wlan0
-Could not get status from wpa_supplicant
Long story short, after verifying your settings are correct in the octopi-network.txt file, open the /etc/network/interfaces file. You can do this with sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces. Then remove the ‘#’ from in front of the lines below the ‘auto wlan0’ section. The lines for me were as follows.
auto wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet manual
wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
Once those lines were no longer commented out, I rebooted and my octopi image immediately connected to WiFi based on the settings in my octopi-network.txt file. If this post helped you or if you see information you believe is incorrect, leave a comment.