How do I setup with WiFi on NanoPi Neo Air?

General Discussion
1

I’m looking for instructions on how to get WiFi configuration loaded onto my NanoPi Neo Air during setup. Ideally I’d be able to place a file on the SD card, however the NanoPi NEO Air uses eMMC so rather than having the fat based boot partition that I could write a network config file onto, the entire SD card is imaged with what I think is a flasher utility that loads the eMMC. I’m used to working with SBCs that run off the SD card, the eMMC is just throwing me for a loop on this one.

Can anyone clear up how I can get WiFi configured on the NanoPi Neo Air as part of a headless setup?

2

Welcome to our community.

I guess you are flashing an *.img file to eMMC? If yes, you could open the image with a program like 7zip and update configuration files inside the image.

Anyway, the Neo Air should have a SD Card slot as well. Theoretically you could try to finish setup on the SD card an copy the data to eMMC later on.

3

I tried modifying the image, unfortunately it did not work and I have no clue why at this point since I have no ability to connect since it isn’t loading. I guess I will have to wait for a serial adapter to come so I can log in via a serial terminal and try to figure out how to do it, but this whole process is beyond what I could ask a user to do, editing wpa_supplicant.conf for RPiOS on a fat partition they could see was pushing it for most of them as it was.

4

The fat partition is specific for RPi OS. Other images like Armbian don’t have such.

What files you tried to modify?

5

I modified /boot/dietpi.txt and /boot/dietpi-wifi.txt, then repacked it into an image file.

6

ok we would need to wait on the console access, otherwise it’s hard to determine what the issue might be.

7

And without it working I don’t have access to the console. The fat partition that Raspberry Pi OS uses makes it quite easy to get a headless setup going, I never really realized just how much easier that fat partition makes things.

8

Basically, this is nothing we are influencing as this is the layout of the used Armbian image.

9

Thanks for letting me know, I think I’ll have to figure out a hotspot style configuration solution.

10

I never got it working with an altered image nor did I ever get the serial connection to work. I did burn the image, then before putting it into the NanoPi I used a Raspberry Pi to mount and edit the 2 dietpi files, then put it into the NanoPi and it worked.