Default PIN for wifi hotspot (solved)?

Using Zynthian
1

EDIT: updating the Zynthian and rebooting it twice seems to have fixed everything (I haven’t tried ethernet-to-ethernet yet, but everything else I’m asking about below was solved by updating on a wired connetion).

I’ve got a spare ARM based laptop that isn’t useful for much and I was hoping to use it as a dedicated machine for accessign the Zynthian at practices. Unfortunately it doesn’t have an ethernet port for direct connection and I won’t always have a local network available, so I hoped to use the Zynthian’s wifi hotspot sometimes (I’ll pick up a USB-ethernet dongle also, but it would be nice to have both options).

The laptop finds the Wifi hotspot immediately and the signal is strong, but I’m prompted to enter a 4 or 8 digit PIN to connect. The current and old web-UI default passwords don’t work like they did in this thread (the error message returned on the Windows machine specifically restates that it has to be numerical, 4 or 8 digits) Leaving it empty doesn’t work and I can’t find any mention of it in the WIKI or on here or any way to view, set or disable it through the Zynthian UI.

Anyone know the default PIN?

2

Password should be the same as the “root” user password I guess.

Otherwise, you can also set your laptop as a wifi hotspot

3

I think the numeric PIN that is being requested is set by the LAN that you plug into the Zynthian’s wired Ethernet port. So you’d need to look into it from that angle - either some admin or yourself talking to your ISP.

4

I didn’t have the Zynthian connected to a LAN at all, actually.

So far:

Wired connection to LAN works fine, which is great except I don’t have convenient access to a physical entry point so it’s not very practical.

Direct wired connection between the Zynthian and a PC laptop with no firewall and a known-good cable works inconsistently - I can’t connect at all with some browsers, with Firefox I can reach the web config tool and log in as long as VNC is disabled, but if I enable VNC (either through the config tool or directly on the zynthian) I can no longer connect to the Zynthian at all until I disable VNC and do a full reboot (sometimes including a power cycle, although it did work once with a soft reboot). Seems like a configuration issue on the PC but I haven’t had a chance to look any further into it yet.

Onboard wifi - sees available networks and lets me get as far as entering my password, then after about a minute trying to connect it will either give me a “can’t configure network” error and drop me back to the onscreen keyboard to reenter my password, or go straight to the onscreen keyboard with no error at all.

USB wifi adapter: same as onboard. I haven’t had a chance to figure out how to disable the onboard wifi yet (IIRC I have to manually edit a config file?), though. Hopefully that will make a difference. EDIT: it sort of did - I was able to connect to my LAN via wifi if I disable the onboard Raspberry Pi wifi and bluetooth in the Zunthian config file, but I’m not able to access the web config tool at all. After disconnecting the Zynthian it hasn’t been ale to connect again and is giving me the error message “can’t enable network” now. After rebooting, it auto-connected to my guest wifi (which has fdifferent login) and when I disconnected from that wifi completely stopped working for about a minute (error 70) and then came back on and autoconnected to the guest network. The web config tool is still inaccessible (times out).

Everything else is working well and I was expecting networking to be shaky because it has been problematic on every raspberry PI I’ve ever used for anything. If I can get an ethernet-to-ethernet connection directly between the Zynthian and a laptop working that will be good enough for me.

EDIT: I’m using the latest Oram image, forgot to mention that.

5

Wow - I thought I understood what you were doing, and now, with that additional explanation, I’m thoroughly confused. Nevertheless, I think if something wants a numeric pin, that’s not a Zynthian function, it’s more of a user-carrier-ISP set pin that is being requested. OTOH I don’t use the hotspot functionality, so maybe I’m way off!

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6

I’ve been able to get hotspot access working by

Adding these lines to the config file to disable the RPi onboard wifi and bluetooth:

dtoverlay=disable-wifi-pi5
dtoverlay=disable-bt-pi5

Using a USB wifi dongle (when I used the internal wifi, all of the Windows machines I tried prompted me for a PIN and wouldn’t allow me to use a regular security key; with the USB dongle the option to use a key is available)

For my network configuration, at least, I can access the Zynthian using

  • Ethernet connection to router: IP address or link-local name
  • Zynthian hotspot: IP address only
  • Direct ethernet-to-ethernet connection: IP or link-local, but both are very inconsistent and enabling VNC breaks connectivity completely until I reboot the Zynthian
  • Wifi connection to router: neither IP address not link-local name work (both time out)

At any rate it’s working well enough to get by at practice now. Hopefully I can get the ethernet-to-ethernet sorted out eventually.

EDIT: it might be worth adding a menu option to disable/enable onboard wifi, to save having to edit the config file when using a USB wifi dongle.

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7

I was trying to make a direct connection between a laptop and the Zynthian so I could access it with VNC when I’m someplace that doesn’t have a LAN, but the laptop I was planning to use for that doesn’t have an ethernet port so I had to do it wirelessly, and for whatever reason Windows wasn’t giving me the option to connect with a password when I used the onboard Pi 5 wifi - switching to a USB wifi dongle AND disabling the onboard wifi completely seems to have fixed that. I’m still not able to access the Zynthian if it’s connected to the LAN wirelessly or with a direct ethernet-to-ethernet connection between it and a laptop that DOES have a port, but connecting it to the LAN via ethernet works and the hotspot works since I disabled internal wifi.

I’d still ideally like to use ethernet-to-ethernet since wifi seems less reliable and the synth engine native GUIs are pretty sluggish (and sometimes go blank) over wifi, but it’s good enough for now. I’d only be using them for sound design anyway, if I’m practicing or playing out I’ll be sticking to the onboard controls and MIDI CC from an Octatrack.

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8

Windows offers the option to enter a classic preshared key instead. There is a small fineprint text with almost no contrast next to the input field for the PIN, if you click that, you can enter the password.

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9

The issue was that before I disabled the internal wifi the option to enter the password was greyed out. Using a USB wifi dongle AND disabling the internal wifi solved it.

10

tried it with Win 11 and Win 10 on two different Zynthians, and no, it is not “greyed out” it is just displayed like if it were, but it is still functional.
If not, there is a problem within Windows. :slightly_smiling_face:
If that is, enter any PIN, the connection will fail and offer to enter a password instead.
WPS feature does not run longer than two minutes, so in case all the above fails, just wait 2 minutes, power-cycle WLAN on your computer, scan for networks and retry. :upside_down_face:

11

It wasn’t available on that specific machine (I could switch from PIN to password authentication but usually the field to enter was greyed out and inaccessible (not possible to enter anything into the text field). When using the Zynthian’s onboard wifi. I tried everything you described before I made my initial post. It displays normally and works if I use a USB wifi dongle on the Zynthian. I’m sure it (and the issue with direct ethernet-to-ethernet connection) is on the Windows side. Probably specifically with the Microsoft account stuff that I strip out of Windows on any PCs I actually use regularly. This is a cheap ARM laptop I got from someone else for free and was planning to devote to Zynthian editing, but I haven’t cleaned up the stock Windows install at all yet, beyond disabling all of the network security while I was testing.

The only Zynthian-specific issue is that I can connect to my LAN wirelessly up to the point of entering my password, but it won’t authenticate (regardless of whether I’m using the onboard or USB wifi modules).

12

Just an update, powering up the Zynthian without the USB wifi dongle connected brought back all problems described above. Unable to connect to wifi at all again, regardless of whether I use the onboard or USB wifi modules. All available networks are duplicated in the list (running the updater yesterday seems to have removed the lines I added to the config file, but the networks visible to the onboard wifi didn’t actually start appearing again until I booted without the dongle attached).

To fix it, I had to power down, connect the Zynthian to the router with an ethernet cable, connect the USB wifi module, and then power back up. This restored my ability to connect to wifi networks and after cycling the network adapters on the two laptops I’m testing with both were able to access the web config panel and VNC, and even though the internal module is still active (so the available networks are displayed twice in the list) the Zynthian is autoconnecting smoothly again so that isn’t a big issue (although it would really be nice to have the option to disable the onboard module from the Zynthian UI).

So far it seems to be persisting across power cycles again.

13

Did you once set the Wi-Fi region code / regulatory domain?
This could be done with once booting Raspberry Pi OS, or you could set it with
raspi-config over ssh or per command line (choose own time zone and regulatory domain, Europe/Berlin and DE are just examples here:

raspi-config nonint do_change_timezone Europe/Berlin
raspi-config nonint do_change_locale en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8
raspi-config nonint do_wifi_country DE

These settings stay persistent in Vangelis, but not in Oram, which neutralises these settings on every webconf or update. Without reg domain setting, built-in Wi-Fi works only in a global minium standard and power.

14

Nope, fresh card using the stable image current as of three days ago. All I’ve done is disable the onboard wifi module in the config file (which didn’t really help) and then run the update (which fixed everything).

That’s good to know, though. I’m sticking to regular Oram for now so I’ll just keep using the USB dongle for now if those settings don’t persist through a webconf connection. Once I’ve had a few months with the Zynthian to really learn my way around it and get it integrated into my setup I might switch to Vangelis and if I do I’ll change the region.

If I’m following you correctly, by default the onboard wifi module’s transmit power is capped at a global minimum (100mw?) but if I set it to US it will operate at the FCC limit of 1w?