This repo contains an example of how to use balena's wifi-connect project from a container to auto-configure your Nvidia Jetson Nano's wifi. Theoretically, this container should be portable to the other Jetson devices (TX1/TX2) but from my testing it will not work out of the box using the built-in Broadcom WiFi chipset on the TX1 and TX2.

This container currently checks if there is an active WiFi connection for its condition to start the wifi-connect software. In the event it is not active, it will begin hosting its own access point (TEGRA) providing the user a location to enter SSID/password credentials. Once configured, it will sleep infinitely.

Currently, you will need to pull this container or build it on the device before it can be started. To test, unplug from Ethernet and WiFi, start the container (or auto-start it at boot), and hop on the TEGRA network. The software hosts a captive portal, so follow the typical WiFi "sign-in" process that you'd see in your corporate coffee shop.

Run manually

This container can be ran via:

docker run --rm -it \
      --privileged \
      --network=host \
      --name=wifi-connect \
      -v /run/dbus:/var/run/dbus \
      murtis/jetson-wifi-connect

Alternatively, you can add this to your docker-compose.yml file and bring up all your containers as part of one command.

docker-compose up

Run automatically

You can set up a systemd service that will call docker at boot. An example would look similar to the following (making a file called /etc/systemd/system/jetson-wifi-connect.service:

# /etc/systemd/system/jetson-wifi-connect.service

[Unit]
Description=Jetson Wifi-connect Service
Requires=docker.service
After=docker.service

[Service]
# Install the docker compose script here.
WorkingDirectory=/opt/jetson-wifi-conect
ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker-compose up
ExecStop=/usr/bin/docker-compose down
TimeoutStartSec=0
Restart=on-failure
StartLimitIntervalSec=60
StartLimitBurst=3

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Note that this service calls the compose file from the /opt/jetson-wifi-connect directory. You'll need to make that directory and copy the docker-compose.yml file there.

This service can then be enabled by: sudo systemctl enable jetson-wifi-connect

Gotchas

I had issues running this software while it is connected via Ethernet. The device will host the access point just fine, but I wasn't able to route to the web page. The best way to test this would be:

1. pull the container while connected via ethernet
2. unplug ethernet
3. run the container

TODO

• User providable wifi config checks
• User providable sleep duration