I bought a Edimax EW-7611UXB - 2-in-1 WLAN 6 AX900 & Bluetooth 5.3 USB-Adapter ( Amazon.de ).
Small, only one dongle and sufficiently fast and modern.
Unfortunately no driver support under Oram due to older kernel…
…which has been fixed by vangelis/trixie!
After adding the following lines to the [all] section of /boot/firmware/config.txt
dtoverlay=disable-wifi
dtoverlay=disable-bt
and a reboot, the internal devices were deactivated and I could simply configure the USB devices via the regular zynthian menus.
Caveat: Have to change the /boot/firmware/config.txt after each update for having the internal devices deactivated… I might lock the file to prevent it from being updated in the future but don’t want to do this in the current stage of activity/fixing on vangelis for not missing potential relevant changes in this file…
Thanks for posting the working config lines - that’s the part people usually have to guess at. On the caveat: rather than locking config.txt, it may be less fragile to keep your two dtoverlay lines in a small text file plus a one-line script that appends them if they’re missing, and run it after each update. That way you get the same result but you never block an update from writing legitimate changes to the file. Worth noting for anyone following along that disabling the internal radios is what makes this reliable - leaving both the onboard and the dongle active is where the odd “connects then drops” behaviour comes from, since wpa_supplicant can end up on the wrong interface. If you want it to survive updates more cleanly it’d be worth asking whether an official “prefer external wifi/bt” toggle in webconf is feasible, since the dongle route is getting more common with the Pi5. Also useful to record: does Bluetooth MIDI over that dongle behave any better than the onboard radio for you in terms of latency and dropouts?
You can add persistent addons to config.txt via Webconf > Hardware > Options > Advanced view (hook set in tickbox upper left). The larger field titled ‘Custom Config’ takes text that will be included into config.txt and stays there across updates. Save, reboot, enjoy.
could you please post the device chipset names? Does Bluetooth work simultaneusly with WLAN or only one of both?
I also thought about the scripted solution, but didn’t have time to implement yet.
The perfect solution indeed would be an official toggle in webconf, either to prefer external devices or at least to disable internal wifi and/or bluetooth. 2 separate toggles seem useful as not everyone might use a dual use dongle and only needs wifi or bt…
I haven’t tested bt MIDI yet (no devices) so can’t comment on that.
The Custom Config field is the right answer here and better than my script idea, so I would go with fussl’s route: put the two dtoverlay lines in webconf rather than editing /boot/firmware/config.txt by hand, and they survive updates without you having to lock anything. Useful that the chipset turned out to be rtw89_8851bu plus btrtl, because that means anyone else looking at a dual-function Realtek dongle can check whether their kernel carries those two modules before buying rather than after. On the two-toggle wish: if you do open a feature request, it is probably worth framing it as disable-internal-wifi and disable-internal-bt separately rather than a single prefer-external switch, since that maps directly onto the overlays that already exist and is much less work than any interface-preference logic. One thing worth testing while you have it set up: after a reboot, confirm which interface actually came up first, because with the onboard radios disabled you should see only the one, and if a stray interface still appears that usually means the overlay did not take.
All of the above have a USB2 connector and work best if internal BT and WLAN are disabled via Webconf > Hardware > Options > Advanced view (hook set in tickbox upper left). in 'Custom Config’ add for Pi5:
