NOTE: This tutorial is not for the faint of heart – there is a lot of compiling and configuring needed, and you should expect it to take a significant amount of time to get everything set up. RTL8188CUS-based adaptors are very cheap and highly available ( link for Ew-7811un), as are RTL8192-based ones, so I feel it’s still worth sharing the knowledge I have found from these resources in one place. Again, though, for an offline system, this should be fine. For you, rebuilding the kernel regularly will take ages on a raspberry pi, so you may want to simply find another wifi adaptor that is better supported. For me, it has been a learning experience, and after the drone is working, I probably won’t continue to update the software. This may also work with other similar adaptors like the RTL8192 series, though my specific device is an RTL8188CUS. I’ll link to anything I found helpful at the end, but essentially this is why I’m writing this post. There are a few tutorials for this, but they all run on old versions of Raspbian for around 2012-2015 and hence are now quite out of date. However, the RTL8xxx series of chips have some issues on Linux, but can be made to work as access points. Well, for most Wifi adaptors, it doesn’t seem to be. I will also need to rebuild hostapd, with the patch for the special rtl871x driver. This will be more difficult than before, as it seems the legacy wireless extensions have been removed from the kernel, and I will need to patch and rebuild it. In this post, then, I’ll be doing this again on modern Raspbian, and hopefully the result will be good enough to work for my short-term pi drone desires.

Sadly, after spending ages making it work and then giving up, I deleted my configuration, because I’m an idiot. I never found out why, but it was probably a driver issue. I was trying to use it as a stationary access point, but it always crashed after a few hours.

Yep, and it didn’t work very well either :D. Well, not this bit… Didn’t you mention having done this before? Well, I happen to have one of these (seriously annoying) wifi adaptors, and I want to make a raspberry-pi based drone with my old Raspberry Pi 1 B+. So, you may be wondering why I’m writing this oddly-specific post. I will come back and update it later if I can, though. UPDATE : I no longer have any working RTL8xxx WiFi adaptors, so unfortunately it doesn’t look like I’ll be completing this post for the foreseeable future.

8192cu driver raspberry pi