Orange Pi Zero wifi alternative. Stable, fast, cheap and Plug 'N Play.

I have ironed out my OPZ woes and have it working well now along with the Mainline Armbian image.

As we may know the onboard wifi is garbage and will not get fixed, however I found a dirt cheap plug and play usb alternative on ebay (or aliexpress.com) using the common (Ralink?) mt7601u kernel driver. As long the dongle matches the photo in the listing it should have the same chipset. It has very low power consumption and at least with my wifi router gets the maximum 10mbit/sec throughput for downloads on my internet connection at a distance of 5 meters.

I also added to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf ....

blacklist xradio_wlan

Before using the nmtui wifi config tool to try stamp out that onboard wifi.

If you do not blacklist it, in nmtui the usb dongle shows as "usb wi-fi", and after disabling the broken onboard wifi driver the usb dongle shows as plain "wi-fi" which I thought was confusing, as I thought only the onboard wifi was working after adding the blacklist.

I thought to mention this in case someone else, like me was searching for a recommended usb dongle.