How to detect if a wireless adapter is recognized in a Pi Zero W?

Question

I'm making an IoT device with a raspberry pi zero w for a friend to use.

Right now, here's what I'm trying to do:

1. Raspberry Pi spins up a wifi network using a USB wifi adapter
2. Any dns lookup will redirect back to the pi itself and that's how the web management interface will be accessible
3. Through the management portal they'll be able to connect the Pi's built in wifi module to their own wifi so that it can use that network for any API requests or whatnot.

I connected this adapter to the Pi Zero W since it was mentioned to be 'Plug-and-Play for Windows 10 and Raspberry Pi' and that no drivers would be required.

I've set up the wpa_config to connect to my current network for testing heedlessly and when I run the ifconfig command I see the following:

lo: flags=73<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING>  mtu 65536
        inet 127.0.0.1  netmask 255.0.0.0
        inet6 ::1  prefixlen 128  scopeid 0x10<host>
        loop  txqueuelen 1000  (Local Loopback)
        RX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

wlan0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.4.29  netmask 255.255.252.0  broadcast 192.168.7.255
        inet6 fe80::31fd:c6b2:a18d:122c  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
        ether b8:27:eb:2b:68:24  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 75  bytes 11453 (11.1 KiB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 71  bytes 11240 (10.9 KiB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

I don't see anything that resembles the adapter in the output.

Is there any way to make sure that it's actually working? If so, how do I get the name of the interface since wlan0 is reserved for the built in wifi module I believe.

Answer 1

ls /sys/class/net will show all detected network devices, even if not configured.

Don't believe anything that says "no drivers would be required".