Hi guys, just bought a Raspberry Pi Version B, with the purpose of setting up a wireless audio streamer – a poor man's Sonos/Squeezebox, if you will. I had purchased a cheapo USD5-6 WiFi dongle based on the RealTek RTL8188CUS chipset to test this out along with a HiFimeDIY Sabre USB DAC 2 External PSU, 96khz/24bit – ES9023+TE7022 + Coaxial OUT TCXO oscillator!!

Connecting the RaspberryPi through Ethernet worked fine – was able to access the webpage on Raspyfi.local straight away and set everything up. Setting up wireless through wicd-curses also seemed straightforward – I setup a static IP and pointed global dns to google's public dns servers. On disconnecting the Raspberry from Ethernet and then rebooting is where all the fun started happening.

I would not be able to connect over wireless 50-60% of the time, sometimes it would connect if I rebooted the router (I dont know what effect that had). I carried the Raspberry Pi around the house like a divining rod, trying to find somewhere where it would work properly (in case the 1A Apple charger that I had connected it to, was not able to provide enough power to the dongle to cross a couple of walls!). I finally got it work in one particular location, thankfully very close to my amps+speakers anyways.

However the WebUI is now not working over wireless – an issue that has been highlighted in some other thread on this forum because of the NAS not mounting in time I assume – on reboots I have noticed it takes around 1-2 minutes before I can ping the Pi again, and that too with wild variations in ping time ranging from 6ms to over 200ms. One other fix that I tried (I dont know if this helped) is that I removed DHCP address allocation from the router and retained the static IP settings on the Raspberry Pi. FWIW, i've also updated the whole Raspberry Pi firmware in the hopes that it will become more reliable. Fingers crossed and hope to hear from you all on measures that can be taken to improve the reliability of the connection!