Disabling internal wifi and other tips on wifi

A. Disabling internal Wifi

Raspberry Pi 3 comes with built-in WiFi and Bluetooth interfaces. If you want to use external dongle (for increased range) you may want to disable internal Wifi. Disabling also helps in decreasing the power consumption.

To disable internal Wifi (and Bluetooth), create /etc/modprobe.d/disable_rpi3_wifi_bt.conf file and add the following. You can skip the last 3 lines if you do not want Bluetooth to be disabled.

 ##wifi
 blacklist brcmfmac
 blacklist brcmutil
 ##bt
 blacklist btbcm
 blacklist hci_uart

B. Configuring Wifi under piSignage

piSignage supports configuring wifi network either using USB keyboard (press ctrl+N) or through webUI interface at http://:8000/settings. Newer images configure piSignage as access point so that you can connect your laptop or smartphone to piplayer_xxxx access point and configure Pi for your access point.

C. Unsecured Network

If the network you are connecting to does not use a password, select the Open-Wifi option instead of the password (in webUI) or leave the password blank in case USB keyboard ctrl+N usage.

Note: /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf file will have the following entry

network={
    ssid="Wifi name"
    key_mgmt=NONE
}

D. Hidden Wifi Network

If you are using a hidden network (i.e. wifi access point name is not broadcast), adding a "scan_ssid" option might help as shown below.

network={
    ssid="yourHiddenSSID"
    scan_ssid=1
    psk="Your_wifi_password"
}

E. Configuring Wifi credentails as part of SD card image

For bulk player configurations, you can also add the wifi settings in SD card image file. Once the SD card is prepared you can create a file /boot/player-config.txt and provide the following information.

server_name=my-domain-name.com
wifi_name="your wifi name(SSID)"
wifi_password="wifi network password"
wifi_hidden=0 

Upon first boot player will program the wifi and server name with the provided info and delete the file.

For more info on wifi at OS level, please refer https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/wireless-cli.md