WiFi not working with Sitecom WLA-3100 (MT7610U) USB dongle

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

Apologies in advance if this thread should have been a post in an existing thread, but I’m not sure if the chipset of my WiFi dongle matches the ones in the support threads I’ve read.

I’m trying to set up an external WiFi dongle on my Raspberry Pi 2 using the latest version of OSMC (kernel: 4.9.29-8-osmc). Unfortunately the dongle doesn’t seem to be recognised. The OSMC GUI doesn’t list a wireless option (ethernet is working). When I try enable wifi using connmanctl the following error is displayed:

Error wifi: Method "SetProperty" with signature "sv" on interface "net.connman.Technology" doesn't exist

The USB dongle I’m using is the Sitecom WLA-3100 and it uses a MediaTek chipset and the MT7610U driver according to this wiki and the output of dmesg. The full output of dmesg can be found here.

Have I hit upon a configuration error on my part, or is this device maybe not supported?

2

Still struggling with this, I’m afraid. Does anybody have any pointers to troubleshoot my issue, or am I better off buying a new WiFI dongle?

3

Well if it runs the MT7610U there are chances that you get it going. But as it is written on the webpage you linked “USB ID not yet observed in any mainline kernel” the USB ID is not listed.
Maybe you can try to first force it to sysfs and see if it works. If that works we can see further.
unplug device
modprobe mt7610u_sta
echo 0df6 0075 > /sys/module/mt7610u_sta/drivers/usb:rt2870/new_id
plug device

Report if that makes it work

4

Ah, I failed to read the particular tidbit about the USB ID not being observed by mainline kernels…

I’ve run the commands, but echoing 0df6 0075 to usb:rt2870 causes bash to complain that the path is a directory. When I run the command as root (not sudo) and append new_id to the path it seems to work.

And that seems to have done the trick, the adapter is recognised and able to connect to wireless networks! After connecting I can’t SSH into the Pi or browse the web though, but I might be getting ahead of myself.

5

My apologies, I forgot new_id, have corrected my post now so that if someone sees it they get it right.

Ok thanks that means @sam_nazarko can add the USB id (0df6 0075) during one of the future updates

6

Thanks again for the help!

I’ve successfully connected to my home network now (I assigned a static IP to the Pi and forgot to set it in connman). I created a service to persist the setting of the id and module. Not sure if this is the correct way to do it, but it works.

[Unit]
Description=Loads mt7610u module and inserts new id
Before=network

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=-/sbin/modprobe -q mt7610u_sta
ExecStart=/bin/bash -c "echo '0df6 0075' > /sys/module/mt7610u_sta/drivers/usb\:rt2870/new_id"

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
9

Good to know, next time there will be a driver update Sam will add the ID so that you don’t need the workaround anymore