Do I have to use a wifi dongle to be able to use cloud features of astroprint?

AstroBox Questions
#1

Do I have to use a wifi dongle to be able to use cloud features of astroprint?

Or is there another way?

#2

That depends on a few things:

  • Which Raspberry Pi do you have?

The Raspberry Pi 3 already comes with a WiFi chip so you don’t need an extra dongle to connect to your WiFi. Older Raspberry Pi boards do need a dongle to connect to a WiFi (or you can use an Ethernet cable)

  • Do you need a hotspot for setup?

For the easiest experience our software supports the creation of a hotspot for setup when the device doesn’t have network configured or it can’t find one previously configured. For this you need two WiFi Devices. The RPi3 would need an additional dongle and older ones would actually need two.

However there are other options for setup that don’t require the extra dongle. See this: https://astroprint.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000337286-How-do-I-setup-AstroBox-Gateway-without-dongle-hotspot-

#3

Thanks. I’ll go with the ethernet cable method.