RPi Gateway: No option to select WiFi on Welcome Screen

Followed Feb 6th 2018 article by Ben Francis to build a RPi gateway. Using Etcher, I flashed gateway-0.4.0.img to a microSD. On booting up the RPi, you can see the “Mozilla IOT gateway”. On connecting with WiFi, you get the welcome screen but there are no WiFi choices only “Skip”. When you skip, nothing happens as the Mozilla IOT gateway dissapears. On rebooting the RPi, the Mozilla IOT gateway broadcast does not appear. The only way to get this back is to flash the microSD card again and start fresh.

The RPi script is sitting at “Gateway login:”

What is the recommendation?

Hmm, it sounds like the Raspberry Pi couldn’t find any WiFi networks nearby.

Which version of the Raspberry Pi do you have? The Raspberry Pi 3 supports 2.4Ghz networks and the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ supports both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz. Anything before that you’ll need a USB WiFi dongle.

Do you have the option of connecting via an Ethernet cable? If so, then the gateway can automatically get an IP address from your router via DHCP and you should be able to connect to it via gateway.local or its IP address to continue setup.

Failing that, you could try logging into the gateway via the command line (see the wiki) and manually configuring networking as per the instructions for Raspbian which might give you more information about what’s going wrong.

Once we’ve figured out what isn’t working, maybe we can improve the error reporting to help people who have this problem in future.

Let us know how you get on.

Thank you and progress of sorts when I reached step 5). 1) Power off/power on and tried to see gateway and not visible 2) Power off and connected cable and still not visibile on power on 3) Power off and re-flashed SD, and on power on and still not visible with cable 4) Set up Android phone hot spot (2.4MHz), Power off and dissconnected cable and not visible when power on. 5) Power off, re-flashed and power on. Could see the Gateway. Clicked the gateway and SUCCESS as now could see a wifi option android hotspot on [IP address]/wifi-setup. Entered password and got [IP address]/connecting.

Nothing seemed then to happen. Clicked the gateway.local link…nothing. Brought up a new tab…nothing. Double checked that PC was pointing to the android hotspot which it was. Tried different browsers…nothing. Power down and power up and repeat…nothing

In the morning, re-flashed and repeated exercise and it continues to freeze on connecting. I changed the settings in windows to connect to the android from “private” to “public” and still frozen.

So the wifi on the RPi B is running on 2.4MHz and this seems to be operational. Once the broadcast is done and you connect to the gateway, you must re-flash to get that broadcast back. I can only think there is something in the house router that stops a gateway from connecting. Success on the android hotspot was limited as the full wifi connect did not go through.

I have not had time to look at the command line option

Note: It can take a long time for gateway.local to be accessible, sometimes over a minute. This is because your PC or smartphone has to notice the mDNS broadcast and map gateway.local onto the Raspberry Pi’s IP address.

So when the gateway tells you to load gateway.local, you might want to try waiting a minute or two before trying. Failing that, you might be able to find the gateway’s dynamic IP address via your router. The gateway also broadcasts its IP address using a Bluetooth beacon so another alternative is to install a Physical Web app which can detect beacons.

Thank you for the advice. Tried the delay on both when I click to connect to the gateway and when I do the gateway.local link with no luck on the Android hotspot. The RPi is speaking to the Android wifi hotspot as my phone tells me how many devices are connected, so there is some form of communication between the Android phone and the RPi. I can switch off the Android hotspot and back on and the RPi automatically connects. Also shut off power to the RPi and back on and it connected OK. I downloaded a Physical Web app and turned on Bluetooth but could not see any beacon.

I have tried gateway.local gateway.local/ www.gateway.local www.gateway.local/ http://www.gateway.local https://www.gateway.local http://www.gateway.local/ https://www.gateway.local/ with no luck before and after switching off/on Android hotspot and RPi. I do feel though that the browsers (even Firefox) are messing up this and not giving the proper code to the RPi to respond.

Not sure how to find the dynamic IP address.

So close to fixing this I feel for the Android and that may give us a clue to why the main house router is not speaking to the RPi.

The mDNS address is http://gateway.local

If that still isn’t working and you can’t detect the Bluetooth beacon then you need to somehow find out the gateway’s IP address yourself. I’m not sure if there’s any way to do that via the UI of your Android device (if you could connect it to your router, that is likely to have a DHCP table in its web interface somewhere).

Your other option is to log into the gateway on the command line (either by connecting a keyboard and monitor or a USB serial adapter) and configuring networking manually, following the instructions in the links above.

I re-read your original blog on the RPi gateway and the image you worked on was version 0.3. The only image available to download was 0.4 which clearly has issues. Do you know where I can get image 0.3? If not available, I will need to try and get 0.4 operational!

I put the RPi on to the screen to log in. The Wiki link above for login is for the basic RPi. The RPi with the SD flashed for the gateway is looking for a different login viz:
“Rasbian GNU/Linux 9 gateway tty1
gateway login: _”

Do you know the gateway login and password for version 0.4?

You can access all past releases here https://github.com/mozilla-iot/gateway/releases

The 0.4 setup process is working for other people so I suspect you will have the same problems with 0.3 if the issue is due to your networking equipment blocking mDNS broadcasts.

The default username and password for the Raspberry Pi should be the same in all versions of the gateway:

  • username: pi
  • Password: raspberry

Rather than flashing 0.3 a better idea might be to try to find the IP address your hotspot is giving the gateway by logging into it, or connecting it to your router via Ethernet if possible. Then you can access the gateway directly by its IP address. If you can get through the setup process and configure a .mozilla-iot subdomain then the mDNS (.local) issues won’t matter any more as you’ll be able to use that domain to access the gateway.