Headless CHIP WiFi

I am working on a modification to hostapd and I really have to run this on linux. The pi I was planning to use has seems to have finally given up the ghost after 4 years of use. Never fear, I failed over to using the chip , that came with my pocketchip flashed with the headless firmware.

The chip will use the microusb connection as a serial port by default, similar to the way the BBB uses the usb port to do ethernet. With a serial connection, I needed to figure out how to get the chip onto wifi.

There is a command line tool for interacting with network manager listed in the chip documentation . nmcli is a pretty great tool for network access.

$ nmcli device wifi list
*  SSID             MODE   CHAN  RATE       SIGNAL  BARS  SECURITY    
*  HameNetwork      Infra  11    54 Mbit/s  100     ▂▄▆█  WPA2        
   NetGear-AWQ4D8   Infra  1     54 Mbit/s  69      ▂▄▆_  WPA1 WPA2   
   BTWifi-X         Infra  6     54 Mbit/s  30      ▂___  WPA2 802.1X 
   BTWifi-with-FON  Infra  6     54 Mbit/s  30      ▂___  --

Better yet, there is a nmtui interface that presents a nice ncurses way to configure the network.

Reading: Babylon's Ashes, Diamond Age