WiFi dongles don't work with OSMC on RaspberryPi?

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
24

The access point is 1000mw and it is 15 feet from the Pi. The dongle connects fine if the OS is Raspbian.

I tried 3 different power supplies with both a Pi3 and the Pi2 with the Edimax WiFi dongle. The Pi3 connects every time but the Pi2 does not. Voltages are with OSMC running and stopped.

            Canakit 2.5A            Kootek 2.0A            Super 3.5A
Pi2      5.07        5.14            5.05         5.13         5.28           5.37
Pi3      5.06        5.14            5.06         5.13         5.31           5.37
25

Could you clarify something here. We have two devices, a Pi2 and Pi3, plus two operating systems, OSMC and Raspbian.

Could you list how all 4 combinations perform?

Plus, could you post a Raspbian log (journalctl and dmesg) where it successfully connects. Perhaps we might spot a significant difference.

Edit: On reflection I might have misread this bit:

with both a Pi3 and the Pi2 with the Edimax WiFi dongle

to mean that both the Pi3 and the Pi2 were run with the Edimax dongle. It’s not clear from the wording.

26

OK, I have resolved the problem and learned something interesting. When I first set up OSMC I did it on my Pi3 with the built-in WiFi and connected it to the netwok. Then I put the OSMC SD card in the Pi2 with the Edimax WiFi dongle and couldn’t get it to connect. I went back and forth a few (about 50) times trying to figure out why the WiFi worked on the Pi3 but not on the Pi2. I knew that the Edimax dongle worked just fine with Raspbian but wouldn’t work with OSMC. So in the process of getting logs for you I put the SD card in a different Pi3 and surprise the WiFi didn’t work. The WiFi configuration in OSMC is apparently specific to the actual WiFi device.

Best to avoid confirmation bias when working with a different system. Thanks for helping me get it running.

27

Connman saves the ssid/password in a file that includes the MAC address of the wifi dongle that ssid/password is assigned to.
So if you haven’t configured your ssid/password with a specific dongle it will not connect