Changing WiFi Settings on Raspberry Pi when away from home

If you set up your Pi at home with a WiFi dongle (in a robot say) and you take it off to a Raspberry Jam event (or into school to show your teacher) you soon find out that you can’t talk to your Pi using the WiFi at the venue.

There are many routes to go down at this point – the most popular being:

• Use a mobile phone as a WiFi hotspot with home WiFi settings
• Use a spare WiFi router with same home WiFi settings

The best way however, to avoid interference with other attendees would be to enter the venue WiFI settings into your Pi.  However this is very difficult unless you have another Linux machine that can read/write your SD card as a Windows machine can’t do that.

One method I’ve come up with is to add a few lines of code at the end of your /etc/network/interfaces file  :

auto eth0:1
iface eth0:1 inet static
address 169.254.64.64
netmask 255.255.0.0 

and then use this command via LX Terminal

sudo apt-get purge ifplugd

And then re-boot.

What this then does is that it allows you to just plug an ethernet cat5 cable between a Windows laptop/netbook and your Pi when you get to the venue/school.

You can then remote into your Pi (using your normal methods) and change your WiFi settings to match up with the venue (Normally just simply  editing /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and putting the venues WiFi name and password in)

Or if your Pi isn’t a robot and stays on the desk next to you, you can then just carry one using it without having to do anything else 🙂

 

Auto Install Remote Control for Raspberry PI (X11VNC) for non-Geeks

This is only for non-geek people to easily set up their Pi for remote control

It is only tested/works on a clean install and not after a lot of fiddling has been done 🙂

Following on from previous success with my auto-install samba (Windows Networking ) I hope that this script will provide a simple way of installing x11vnc which give you full remote control over the normal Raspberry Pi standard desktop.

This is very useful when you want to power your Pi off batteries and stick some wheels on it and turn it into a robot vehicle.

To install, run LX Terminal and copy and paste the following code:

wget http://goo.gl/MbfUEp -O isx11.sh

and then press enter to download the installer

Once it has finished downloading, type the following and follow the instructions:

sudo bash isx11.sh

At the end, you need to reboot your Pi and then you should be able to use a VNC program on another computer (I use TightVNC myself) to connect and control and view your Pi

Good luck.