Banana Pi came out with a brilliant WiFi/Bluetooth adapter to add the functionality to their flagship BPi M5. It works a treat and offers fast connectivity, but needs off-board antennas and some know-how to set up.
Build quality9
Implemented technology10
Ease-of-use6
Price/performance ratio10
PROS
Adds a fast wireless connection to the M5
Reliable performance
CONS
Antennas not included
Setup requires a bit of tinkering
Takes up the entire GPIO header
As a demo project, we created a little Wi-Fi enabled display stand using the SunFounder 10,1″ LCD touchscreen, Banana Pi M5 and the RT8822CS BPI WiFi/BT adapter. The display setup was extremely smooth and easy, but the WiFi module setup required some additional steps.
After installing the RT8822CS WiFi module on the back of the M5, we enabled the environment overlays for the “wifi_bt_rtl8822cs” layout. These overlays are found in
/boot/firmware/overlays
and the environment file is at
/boot/boot.ini
To enable WiFi, we must also load its driver. The manual way is running the modprobe command and passing a parameter with the driver name. The issue here is finding that parameter – which is not documented anywhere readily available. After some poking around, we determined that the driver’s name is 88x2cs, and running “modprobe 88x2cs” loaded up the driver for us.
For automatic WiFi loading upon bootup, “88x2cs” should be added in a new line of the modules in etc directory.
After doing this, we had a great little touchscreen-enabled wireless IoT device, capable of connecting to various databases or websites and displaying dashboard data.
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