Adding Wi-Fi dongle over USB OTG

An easy way to communicate with your Pi and get your little computer connected to the Internet is connecting it to a USB Wi-Fi adapter. Once you have your Raspberry Pi Zero connected to Wi-Fi, we can get it to interact with pretty much anything that lives on your home network.

Getting ready

For this recipe, you will need your Raspberry Pi Zero, a USB OTG adapter, and a USB Wi-Fi device. Most of this equipment comes with any starter kit and is inexpensive to buy individually-the OTG adapters can be found for less than $5 and Wi-Fi dongles are $10-$15. It is still amazing that a lot of these accessories cost at least as much as the computer they are needed for!

A small USB OTG dongle and Wi-Fi adapter make for a pretty small setup:

You do need to add power, but even with that, you maintain a very small footprint for what will be an Internet-enabled computer.

The embedded Linux site ( elinux.org ) has a comprehensive listing of tested and compatible Wi-Fi cards...