Pi Wi Fi Yah!

The week started with me pottering around with the PIC programmer and the breadboard working out how to make things happen. I got the LED flashing and being able to recognise a off and on signal. May not sound like much but it is a start to know more about the potential use of PICs on the layout.

The new wifi dongle from the UK arrived during the week. Friday night arrived and I decided lets see if the Pi recognises it. Popped it in, turned it on, waited for the boot up and nothing happened. Aaarrrgghhhh!!!! Then I thought that perhaps all my ginning around previously had buggered up the backend configs etc. So I took the momentous decision to start from the beginning again and reimage the SD card. After a bit of ginning around to get the screen output displaying correctly (overscan settings to adjust the left and right pixels) I was able to read the screen. I fired up the windows gui and it had an application I hadn't seen before to do with the wifi config. Well this was a start in the right direction! Fired this up and with a few clicks and text entries entered, BINGO! the dongle was up and running, scanning and seeing my wifi router. The little bugger even auto-connected and I had an Internet connection. THANK GOD! Hooray, and all that nonsense!

Saturday had other things to do, and the night was a right off due to a street Xmas party. I behaved myself and only had three heavies before heading home to look after a sick son, but you have to have a couple more while getting dinner ready don't you;-) ? So after the fifth heavy I was a bit weary.

Sunday morning was more promising in that I was able to get sick son lying beside me in a chair watching Thomas the Tank Engine while I tinkered around with the Pi. I installed JMRI before switching off for the day. In the evening I was able to configure JMRI and was able to fire up Engine Driver with a connection to my smartphone.

So this week, investigate how to convert the Pi into an access point rather than have to rely on the wifi router to make the connection. The reason for this is eventually I don't want to have to connect the Pi to the Internet but just use it as a wireless LAN to just connect wirelessly to smartphones and tablets. For updating of the software etc, I would disconnect the Pi from the layout (as it is in the shed) and take it back to my computer in the house and hard connect via ethernet cable to my PC to get an Internet connection. The other option could be to have a second dongle. One would be configured as the Internet connection and the other the wifi LAN access point. I might be getting ahead of myself but it is a plan m'Lord! First things first though is to next connect the Pi/JMRI to the NCE and MERG systems and test connectivity.

Not sure if I will get back to the PIC programmer this week, but with Xmas-New Year approaching I will have some spare time (amongst the Things to Do list that has been waiting for me all year!) to tinker with the programmer.