Configuring the Raspberry Pi 3 and BeagleBoards for Wifi

[Flash]

How to Configure the Raspberry Pi 3 and BeagleBoards for Wireless Connections

The low cost Raspberry Pi single board computer has been a tremendous success, providing system designers with an affordable controller board that can be programmed in industry standard Debian Linux. What the Pi has lacked so far has been integrated wireless capabilities. The Raspberry Pi A and B, and the Pi2 all needed an external Wi-Fi or Bluetooth dongle in order to create wireless links. The latest version of the board, the Raspberry Pi 3, adds a 64-bit quad core ARM® Cortex®-A53 processor with the frequency boosted to 1.2 GHz and adds both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Smart 4.0 for a similar price as the earlier boards. The boards have been in pre-production for many months before the launch, and are available from suppliers such as Seeed.

This opens up a huge opportunity for using the board in the Internet of Things (IoT), connecting easily to a router or gateway to deliver data from sensors or provide control from a smartphone or Internet-connected terminal. The quad-core processor also provides more processing power for analyzing data locally and running a wider range of control algorithms locally, as well as providing faster responses.

Many of these IoT applications do not use a screen, and so the boards are configured via a ‘headless’ approach. This uses the Ethernet connection to a terminal or a serial console cable. The software for making this connection is included in the standard software image that is included with the Raspbian operating system on an SD card that slots into the board.

Raspbian is based on Debian Linux and regularly updated with libraries from the Raspberry Pi Foundation and installed via the NOOBS installer application on the board. However, the Foundation has deliberately made it straightforward to replace the root partition on the SD card with another ARM Linux distribution so that other operating systems can be used. These can be downloaded onto the card from a PC or laptop to be used with the board before a connection is made....

You can order the Raspberry Pi 3 online from Digi-Key.

[april]

Sounds good but expensive . An ESP8266 will do the same for $3 connected and programmed as per the ESP8266 forum . Lots of examples and working code in the examples and some for Pi and some for Arduino.

I have been sending data up to various sites like Sparkfun data and others for two years now with these .

[don570]

I find my raspberry pi2 easy to hook up to a network
using fatdog arm. There's no need to memorize complex commands.

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