How to setup WiFi on Raspberry Pi 3?

intro

the raspberry pi 3 comes with integrated wireless lan (wlan – 802.11n), that is, wifi and bluetooth adapters. This means that all you need is your Raspberry Pi 3 to connect to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and there is no need for additional peripherals like USB dongles (for Wi-Fi or Bluetooth). In this tutorial, I will teach you how to configure wifi on raspberry pi 3.

wifi configuration will be explained both for the ssh connection (command line) in case of headless configuration and from the raspbian desktop in case of using raspberry pi with monitor (or tv) and keyboard.

First, we will see the steps required to configure wifi on raspberry pi 3 using the command prompt (using an ssh connection). This type of configuration is only necessary if you configure the raspberry pi in non-monitor mode, that is, without a monitor or keyboard.

We have already seen a tutorial on how to set up raspberry pi 3 without monitor and keyboard before. it is very important that you complete that setup first to proceed with wifi setup.

configure wifi on raspberry pi from terminal (putty)

Before we get into the details of wifi setup on raspberry pi 3, let’s recap the important steps in headless setup of raspberry pi.

• format the microsd card with the sd card formatter
• download raspbian jessie os
• write the os (.img file) to the microsd card with win 32 disk imager
• enable ssh by creating a blank file with the name ssh and no extension
• insert the microsd card into the raspberry pi, connect the ethernet cable and turn on the raspberry pi

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• scan the ip addresses and write down the ip address of the raspberry pi
• start putty and enter the ip address of the raspberry pi
• login with the name of default username and password

note: at this point, the ip address assigned to the raspberry pi is 192.168.1.19 in our case. you can notice this in the second line as “password for [email protected]:” in the screenshot above.

Please note this ip address as we need to look up the ip address again after wifi setup.

configure until this step is enough to configure the wifi. after starting wifi and connecting to a network, we can continue with other steps like vnc viewer.

After successfully logging into the raspberry pi using any ssh client like putty, type the following command and press enter.

This command will return a list of all wireless networks that are available near the raspberry pi. the network name can be identified by the essid line. in our case, the network name is “slnp”.

Now, we need to connect our Raspberry Pi to this network. For that, we need to make some changes to the wpa_supplicant.conf file.

In this file, we need to add the name of the wifi network and also the password. so, to open the file, type the following command and press enter.

you may notice that the file will already have a line like country=gb etc. just below the existing content, enter the following command.

{

ssid=”wifi network name”

psk=”wifi network password”

}