In previous posts, I mentioned a problem with ESP8266 modules when using a Orange Livebox (the router let by my ISP). It was confirmed by someone else (thanks you Sébastien H.) that splitting into 2 SSIDs 2.4 Ghz & 5 Ghz and forcing all clients on the 2.4 Ghz helps.

I also received a few queries about how I worked around this problem...

Well, basically, I bought a Wifi dongle I installed on my Raspberry and created a new totally private network aside. It probably helps a tiny bit with security but it is a bit of a pain with kernels/modules as my dongle is not recognised with the standard kernel.

An alternative could have been to use a cheap Wifi repeater/booster since most of them just create a new SSID bridged to the base network. The risk being this new bridge behaving like the Livebox.

Help with a Wifi dongle on a Raspberry Pi

In theory, the process is straightforward:

apt-get install -y hostapd firmware-realtek isc-dhcp-server iw

See, for example, https://learn.adafruit.com/setting-up-a-raspberry-pi-as-a-wifi-access-point/install-software

As indicated above, I have an issue with the default kernel module 8188eu... The Wifi dongle is only half recognised and doesn't initialise properly. Fortunately, a functional version can be found pre-compiled here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=62371.

• First, find the filename name in the list according to the dongle and the kernel version

uname -a

• Then the module can be downloaded for Raspberry P1 or P2 (look for dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/80256631/8188eu-2015yyzz.tar.gz or dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/80256631/8188eu-v7-2015yyzz.tar.gz on the page).

• Once installed, all Wifi tools (and in particular iw ) should work properly.