Adding wifi to the Raspberry Pi Zero with a hack

raspi_edimax_hack_2-1

Shintaro decided he wanted to add wi-fi to his Zero. Rather than mess about with converter cables and adapters, he has instead taken apart the dongle and soldered it directly to the correct lines on the Pi. He carefully kept the two USB data line wires the same length to avoid messing up the signal and then wrapped the whole thing in clear insulation. You can see from the picture above what he did to the dongle (which is an Edimax). Using the raw 5V output from the power supply can be a bit dodgy, so caution is advised.

8 comments for “Adding wifi to the Raspberry Pi Zero with a hack

  1. Fascinating and will give it a whirl bit actually I was looking for a way of configuring my PiZero to connect to my router/hub. I understand the process is ‘automatic’ when connecting via an Ethernet>USB but is a tad more complex when using a dongle. Can you point me in the right direction?
    Many thanks.

  2. Is it still possible to connect to the micro USB connector with USB peripherals with the hack installed?

  3. Thanks Michael,

    I had remembered seeing this a while back, and when I went looking for it, I was hoping to find on your site. With my new found Linux Mint appreciation, and easy wifi set up for RPZ from Linux terminal (modifying the wpa_supplicant.conf file right after flashing the sd card from the same machine), I will try this next.

    Thank you.

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