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Comment by nathan_f77 | Hacker News Reader

Awesome!! I just wish they would release one with onboard Wifi instead of ethernet. I have no statistics to back this up, but I'm pretty sure that USB Wifi adapters would be the most common accessory.

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It's probably the economics of FCC/CE testing vs utility. The testing for unintentional radiators is onerous enough. If you add an intentional radiator, you trigger a whole lot more tests and a whole more cost.

I use the onboard ethernet pretty constantly, mainly because I find the wireless to be finicky and hard to troubleshoot when you're running a headless setup. I can always plug in an ethernet cable, though...

Agree. However Finally I was able to keep an uptime greater than 2 months on my Pi by using a wifi dongle and a bunch of cron scripts to keep alive the connection when my router reboots or the dongle 'freezes' which seems is a common issue when using RPi of any kind :(

I had that issue as well, where it would freeze if it transferred lots of data (as in, a large number of files in a dir would freeze it when doing ls on the terminal), and the problems went away with a higher-amperage power supply.

that's probably a bad dongle.

i connect my htpc via a Wi-Fi USB dongle as well. it runs both Linux and windows 7. and despite the os and drivers one model always hang after a day or so. another one, different model from same brand is online for months at a time.

it's mostly badly designed/tested hardware.

I was expecting a answer like "my dongle X just works on the Pi" :-) I do not doubt it is a problem with the hardware or the drivers, I just say it is a common problem with many dongle vendors specially in the Pi. I know I could buy a RPi-certified dongle, but I do not like wasting hardware if I can fix it just with a few scripts. No offense :)

WiFi on the Pi 'just doesn't work.'

You can get it working for a while, but it's nowhere near the reliability of standard domestic WiFi.

I've built various sensor/hardware projects and tried various dongles, and I've always had to switch back to a cabled connection.

Depending on what you're trying to build, a Spark Photon might be a better fit for your project.

It'd be great to have wifi on board, but ethernet is still important.

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