If you want to connect your RaspberryPi to your home network and you want to avoid cables, I suggest you to use the Edimax wifi adapter. This device is quite cheap (around £8 on Amazon) and it's very easy to configure on Raspbian (I assume you are using a recent version of Raspbian. I'm using the one released on 20/06/2014).

Configure the wifi adapter

Edit /etc/network/interfaces and insert these configuration values:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp

allow-hotplug wlan0
auto wlan0

iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid YOURESSID
wpa-psk YOURWPAPASSWORD

Power management issue

There is a known "issue" with this adapter default configuration that makes it to turn off if the wlan interface is not in use for some minutes. To avoid this you have to customize the parameters used to load the kernel module. First check that your adapter is using 8192cu module:

sudo lsmod | grep 8192
8192cu 551136 0

Create the file /etc/modprobe.d/8192cu.conf and insert the following lines inside:

# prevent power down of wireless when idle
options 8192cu rtw_power_mgnt=0 rtw_enusbss=0

I also suggest to create a little entry in crontab to make the RaspberryPi ping your router every minute. This will ensure that your wifi connection will stay alive. To edit crontab just type (from pi user, you don't need to be root):

crontab -e

and insert this line at the end:

*/1 * * * * ping -c 1 192.168.0.1

where 192.168.0.1 is the IP of your router (of course substitute this value with the ip of your router).

Keep Alive Script

I created a further script to keep my WIFI alive. This script will ping the router (change the IP using the one of your router) every 5 minutes and if the ping fails it brings down the wlan0 interface, the kernel module for the wifi and bring them up again.

Just put this script in /root/wifi_recover.sh and then execute from root user:

chmod +x wifi_recover.sh
crontab -e

Insert this line inside the crontab editor:

*/5 * * * * /root/wifi_recover.sh

Conclusion

The configuration is done. Just reboot your RaspberryPi and enjoy your wifi connection.

Introduction

As many of you already know, Fon is a spanish company that some years ago had the interesting idea of creating a wifi community to share the Internet connection. The idea is quite simple: each "fonero" buy a Fonera (the router sold by Fon), register it on the Fon system and get a username/password. If the fonero travels around the world he's able to connect to wifi signal of other foneras and browse the web for free.

When I bought my first fonera few years ago, I was one of the first people in my city. I bought it because I was really beliving in this project. During these years Fon produced new models of fonera and I bought each of them (the WRT54 router, Fonera, Fonera+, Fonera 2.0g, Fonera 2.0n ecc....). Since first year, the Fon community has grown a lot and now there are a lot of foneros around the world.

Actual situation

Few months ago Fon launched a very interesting product: Fonera 2.0g. Thats's not only a router. Fonera 2 is capable of managing torrents, rapidshare downloads, uploading photo on Facebook and Flickr, and much more. Whats's wrong with this product? It's very unstable! There are a lot of users that bought this router when it was anounced and they're still waiting for a lot of bugs to be fixed by Fon developers team (composed by only ONE person!). Why users had to wait so long?

Simple! They were working to Fonera 2.0n! Wow! Faster router, more RAM, 4 ethernet port, wonderful! But... another very unstable router! And with unstable I mean: it disconnects/reboots often, connection is unstable, applications don't work ecc.... I'm talking about a 79€ router, not about something that users had as preview product. Me and other users were still waiting for an uograde when... Fon announced a new product! Yes, another one!

Fon priority is not to fix a product that thousand of users have already bought. Fon priority is to produce and sell a new product!

Conclusion

It could be only my opinion, but I don't trust you anymore Fon! I'm really disappointed about your behaviour you had with your customers. I've already spent (wasted) a lot of money with your not-working products and I'm not going to buy your products anymore! I'm tired of being illuded by your promises: how long are you going to play tricks on users?

Dopo averne sentito tanto parlare, senza mai aver avuto occasione di provarla direttamente, mi sono deciso a costruire una mini antenna parabolica per potenziare il segnale del router wireless.

Dalle poche prove che ho potuto fare, in effetti il segnale viene potenziato abbastanza. Ad esempio ricercando le reti wireless con il palmare da camera mia al salotto, il segnale del router era di circa metà. Avendo messo l'antenna nuova il segnale è quasi pieno!

Consiglio a tutti di provare questa soluzione, potrebbe potenziare molto il vostro segnale wireless e permettervi di avere un segnale molto piu' stabile in qualsiasi punto della casa.