I need to send the pis off to a location that I will no longer have access to. I need to manually set the wifi ssid and password before I send them off. However, I noticed that the wpa_supplicant is not being used. I’ve tried the raspi-config but it wants to find the ssid before it commits it.
How can I manually set the wifi creds before I ship these off?
@bsparks, let me take a closer look at it. How is Anthias installed on these devices—did you use the installer script or did you use the release images?
I did use the installer script on these.
@bsparks, thanks. I’m still checking other possible solutions.
Thank you Nico! I’ve tried to add the wpa_supplicant file but that didn’t work. I appreciate your help.
Do you think I could run some shell script set on a cronjob? If wifi is not set, then let’s activate the network manager and add in the details.
@bsparks, yes. Feel free to try to come up with a cronjob in the meantime. It’s an option since Wi-Fi details are known.
Hi all, a quick update for anyone landing on this thread: we’ve brought back WiFi setup via a captive portal in Anthias, in PR #3399. When a screen has no working network, it raises its own access point and shows the network name and passphrase on screen. You join it from your phone or laptop and pick the WiFi network to connect to. No SSH, keyboard, or nmcli needed.
It’s merged into master and we’re calling for testers. If no issues turn up, it’ll ship in the next release, but we’d really appreciate the community’s help putting it through its paces first. The easiest way to try it is with the installer script, choosing the latest option (installs from master). Please report how it went (Pi model, OS, wired or WiFi, anything odd) here or on the PR.
For the more technically curious: the old integration was built on balena’s wifi-connect, which had quietly stopped working for us (among other things, no ARMv6 binary since v4.4.6). So we wrote our own implementation from scratch in Rust as a replacement: Screenly-Labs/wifi-connect. It talks to NetworkManager directly, works out on its own whether a screen actually needs setup (so wired or already-connected screens are left alone), and backs off on sites where there’s nothing to join. Bug reports and PRs on that repo are very welcome too.