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I have recently purchased a Model 2 Pi and a TP-Link WN725N wireless USB device. According to what I have read, since it is a V2 WN725N device, I need to download and install the Realtek 8188eu driver. However, before i do that i need to run "lsusb" to get the hex identifier so I know which drive to download. The problem is the device isn't listed when I run lsusb.

How do I get the Pi to "see" the device?

Output from dmesg 

r8188eu 1-1.5:1.0: Direct firmware load for rtlwifi/rtl8188eufw.bin failed with error -2  
r8188eu 1-1.5:1.0: Firmware rtlwifi/rtl8188eufw.bin not available  
MAC Address = e8:94:f6:15:da:6a  
usb 1-1.5: USB Disconnect, device number 9  
R8188EU: ERROR indicate disassoc
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    Unplug and reconnect the dongle, run dmesg to see if you get any messages at all when it's plugged in. Or connect it to another computer running Linux to try to get the USB id. It should show with lsusb, regardless of whether you have the drivers or not.
    – Frepa
    Feb 9, 2015 at 11:05
  • Updated to include output from dmesg. Unplugging and reconnecting made no difference.
    – jonnyknowsbest
    Feb 9, 2015 at 11:41
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    So it seems you have a driver but are missing a firmware file. Searching for the name of that file pointed me here.
    – Frepa
    Feb 9, 2015 at 12:28
  • Frepa - do you want to transfer this into an answer so i can accept? Thanks for the help
    – jonnyknowsbest
    Feb 9, 2015 at 13:54

1 Answer 1

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From the dmesg output, you see that the driver r8188eu recognizes the WiFi dongle, but cannot load firmware for it, since the firmware file cannot be found.

The Raspberry Pi forum has two threads about getting these WiFi devices to work under Raspbian.

Normally USB devices can be seen in the lsusb output even if a suitable driver is not available. I believe the dongle did not show up, because it is disconnected when the firmware is not found, as the last two dmesg lines show.

I found that the regular Debian package firmware-realtek contains the required file. This would be a clean and convenient way to get it, but on my Raspbian I don't have this file, even though the package is installed.

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    Yeah, i followed the link you posted above and it led me to the firmware download for the 8188eu chipset. As soon as I installed that, Raspbian identified the dongle succesfully. Many thanks for your time and help on this.
    – jonnyknowsbest
    Feb 9, 2015 at 16:02

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