Jetson Nano Edimax EW-7611ULB

I obtained a Nvidia Jetson Nano to start learning about machine learning and to build a robot. One of the frustrations I encountered is the lack of a good inexpensive WiFi and Bluetooth solution that works out-of-the-box. A cheap USB dongle, the Edimax EW-7611ULB, combines both WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities into one dongle, but it will not work out-of-the-box with the Nvidia Jetson Nano. This dongle is much cheaper than using a M.2 WiFi card plus two antennas, plus, you don't need to worry about mounting the antennas.

This page contains instructions on how to correctly install the drivers for the EW-7611ULB.

Before you start, you need to already have your Ubuntu environment setup, and you must be connected to the internet via the ethernet cable.

Step 1

Update your package manager and install the tools you will need.

Run in the terminal:

sudo apt update

sudo apt install build-essentials dkms git libelf-dev

Step 2

The EW-7611ULB uses the RealTek chipset but your Linux distribution has old/malfunctioning drivers already installed. We need to disable them by blacklisting them.

Run in the terminal:

echo "blacklist rtl8192cu" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

echo "blacklist rtl8xxxu" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Step 3

Obtain this driver from lwfinger's github.

Run in the terminal:

git clone https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8723bu.git

cd rtl8723bu

Step 4

Correct the makefile before you build the driver.

Open the makefile using any text editor (such as gedit)

Look for the line

EXTRA_CFLAGS += -DCONFIG_CONCURRENT_MODE

Comment it out so it looks like

1. EXTRA_CFLAGS += -DCONFIG_CONCURRENT_MODE

Then, we need to change the build architecture to be ARM64, or else you'll encounter an error about AARCH64 (which kind of means it doesn't realize the platform you are using is a 64 bit ARM CPU)

Look for the line

SUBARCH := $(shell uname -m | sed -e s/i.86/i386/ | sed -e s/ppc/powerpc/ | sed -e s/armv.l/arm/)

And change it so that it looks like

SUBARCH := arm64

Step 5

Prepares the kernel with dkms and also copy some required files

Run the following commands in the terminal:

source dkms.conf

sudo mkdir /usr/src/$PACKAGE_NAME-$PACKAGE_VERSION

sudo cp -r core hal include os_dep platform dkms.conf Makefile rtl8723b_fw.bin /usr/src/$PACKAGE_NAME-$PACKAGE_VERSION

sudo dkms add $PACKAGE_NAME/$PACKAGE_VERSION

sudo dkms autoinstall $PACKAGE_NAME/$PACKAGE_VERSION

Step 6

Build and install the compiled module

Run the following commands in the terminal:

make

sudo make install

Finished

REBOOT the Jetson Nano

Sources

Thanks to everybody on these forum pages where I found the information needed to perform this installation

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1049303/jetson-nano/jetson-nano-wifi-/post/5329699/#5329699

https://forums.libretro.com/t/jetson-nano-meh-so-far-vs-rpi/21685

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2398387

https://forum.pine64.org/archive/index.php?thread-5049.html

https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8723bu