When you say you have tried flashing a card with the vanilla Raspberry image with Raspberry Pi Imager, did you tick Configure Wireless LAN box and populate the SSID and Password fields? (this is only optional with the FlightAware image) - if you do that and enable ssh, you can then use the macOS terminal App to talk to the pi if it boots and acquires an IP address.
Perhaps you could try again with a plain Raspberry Pi image, making sure that you have the right device selected and with the recommended OS for that device (first in the list).
If that doesn’t boot, it points to a hardware problem.
Using the FA image and the Etcher loader, I’ve tried various permutations of network settings. When I first started, I got something wrong in the WiFi configuration, I could see the device listed in my router but it had no IP address. So I went back, fixed the problem, reflashed the card. Since then, nothing I’ve tried has worked to get the card to show up in my router.
The piaware-config.txt settings for WiFi (no other part of that file changed) (change: fixed formatting for the code quote:)
wireless-type dhcp
# Alternatively, a static address configuration
# can be provided; set "wireless-type" to static to use this.
wireless-ssid OlympianIOT
wireless-password " "
# wireless-type static
# wireless-address 192.168.12.5
# wireless-netmask 255.255.255.0
# wireless-broadcast 192.168.12.255
# wireless-gateway 192.168.12.1
# wireless-nameservers 1.1.1.2 68.6.68.6
(password blanked out.) When I insert the card with this configuration, the blinky light has a flickering pattern I’d find consistent with reading the card. Also the card is named “boot”.
I tried the Raspberry Pi imager, selecting Zero (not Zero 2) as the device and the first listed Pi OS. The card is named “bootfs”. Here’s the WiFi configuration for that image:
Inserting this card and booting the Zero produces different behavior on the blinky light. No flickering like I got with the other card/other OS load (so I suspect that OS image is not being read, for whatever reason.)
Is there anything left to try, before concluding it’s a hardware problem?
Power supply is 2.5a @ 5v. The idea of buying the Flight Aware kit was the presumption they used products that worked properly without my having to go buy and integrate separate components.
add the question I have now is whether I’ve exhausted all the things I can do with software, and therefore need to go back to FlightAware to replace the hardware. (Reading comments on Amazon on Zero 1W, it seems ‘wireless failures’ are pretty common.)
A question mark in the password, which is why the password is in quotes (as suggested by the comments in the config file.)
update Huh! If I remove the quotation marks around the password, the board does show up in my router, but doesn’t have an IP address. And if I use a router facility to assign it an IP address from the DHCP server, that still doesn’t show up. I get timeouts when pinging that assigned IP address. It’s the bottom entry here.
some more things I tried I wondered if the order of declarations would be significant. So I made sure the “wireless-type static” line appears before the SSID/Password and before the IP configuration. That does seem to make a bit of difference. If SSID/Password proceeded wireless-type, device doesn’t show up. With SSID/Password after wireless-type, the device shows up on the router, BUT I STILL DON’T SEE A VALID IP ADDRESS IN THE ROUTER.
One more permutation to try, put the IP configuration before the SSID/Password… And nope, that didn’t change anything.
Well, since the Zero does show up on the router without quotes and without backslashing the question mark, I’m inclined to believe that’s not the problem.The router is reporting signal strength, bytes transferred, etc. with the Zero. It just doesn’t show an IP address for the Zero, so nothing else is working.
And I tried backslashing the question mark, and the Zero does not show up in the router.
Uh, no, because that would break the other stuff connected to the router, and as you probably know, that’s bad password practice. I might be able to set up a test network (“guest/guest”), but certainly not as the end solution.
I just now tested and found that removing both the back-slash and quote marks from piaware-config.txt makes the wifi work. It is now like below and works well:
Can you attach a monitor and keyboard to the pi?
If you can, the just log into the pi and type “sudo raspi-config” (without the quotes) and set the WiFi parameters there.
Yes. Password with no quotes and no escaping the ? works. Password with quotes or with escaping the ? does not work. I haven’t tried both quotes and escapes.
And to LawrenceHill - I suppose I could try attacking a keyboard to the -1- USB port on the Zero and a monitor to the HDMI port. Of course, that presumes the Zero actually has some sort of usable OS, given the other problems, I can’t fairly assume that.
This forum has told me I can’t do any more posts today, and I’m pretty well tired/pissed off with this stuff not working as advertised. I’ll probably send it back to FlightAware, unless someone here has some significantly new thing to try. In particular, when the documentation is WRONG (i.e. that putting the password in quotes fails, while no quotes works), that peggs my frustration-meter.
I created a new WiFi network with a more simple password (no special characters). That showed up WITH AN IP ADDRESS on the router. However, that network is tunneled in the router, so I can’t even ping it. That looks like stuff I can mess with on the router side, rather than the Pi.
I reworked the router to place the Pi on my trusted network. I can ping it, and can open the webpage using the IP address from the router.
From this I conclude there is a problem in how WiFi passwords are handled by the piaware image. I don’t know if it’s a documentation problem, an issue with what can be done with the config file, or a problem within the OS loaded from the piaware image. I also wonder if there are some “security features” in that image that restrict access to the device only from the same SUBnet, but that might be an issue at my router.
Yes, that is exactly what I would do.
You will then be able to see it boots up or not. If it boots then you only have a WiFi / Networking problem. If it doesn’t boot then you have a bigger problem.
