EBuyer sent me one of these for free to review. There were no conditions attached, leaving me free to give (as always) an honest opinion of the product.
This Edimax wifi dongle is tiny. In fact, the packaging maintains that it’s the “World’s Smallest!” I don’t know about that, but it certainly is small. It runs at 150Mbps and is a 802.11 dongle that will run on class b, g and n networks. It is compatible with all modern wifi routers and you shouldn’t have any problems connecting it to your home or work network.
Inside the packaging is the dongle itself, a small manual and a mini CD containing drivers for XP, Vista and Windows 7.
Drivers for Windows 8 need to be downloaded. This could be tricky if you don’t have internet access, but we’ll let that one pass as what we’re really interested in is if it works with the Raspberry Pi.
First of all, in order to use this dongle (like 99% of the other dongles available), you either need to switch your Pi off before you plug it in or plug the dongle into a powered USB hub. Plugging it in whilst your Pi is running will cause it to reboot and potentially corrupt your SD card. Please take my word for it!
Having plugged the dongle in, I used lsusb to ensure that the dongle has been detected correctly (which it had) and it read:
Edimax Technology Co., Ltd EW-7811Un 802.11n Wireless Adapter [Realtek RTL8188CUS]
and then used usb-devices to check it’s power consumption.
T: Bus=01 Lev=02 Prnt=02 Port=01 Cnt=02 Dev#= 4 Spd=480 MxCh= 0
D: Ver= 2.00 Cls=00(>ifc ) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS=64 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=7392 ProdID=7811 Rev=02.00
S: Manufacturer=Realtek
S: Product=802.11n WLAN Adapter
S: SerialNumber=00e04c000001
C: #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=80 MxPwr=500mA
I: If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 4 Cls=ff(vend.) Sub=ff Prot=ff Driver=rtl8192cu
As expected, the dongle will use a maximum of 500mA. I have seen a dongle that reserves less power than this, and I’m surprised (given the green credentials proudly displayed on the box) that they couldn’t have operated at a lower reserved current. Having said that, most wifi dongles reserve 500mA so it wasn’t unexpected. Apparently the actual power usage is closer to 70mA, which is very acceptable.
I booted the Pi into X windows and used the Wifi Config utility program to connect to my home network. There were no problems – the connection was made quickly and without any fuss. I used the dongle for about 2 hours without any problems during 2 separate sessions on an ‘n’ network without any problems whatsoever. The connection automatically picked up upon multiple reboots. I was able to get a good distance away from the wifi router with several walls in between. In fact, signal strength results were very similar to those from my work laptop which has a very good wifi card in it.
There’s not much more I can say. It does the job very nicely and, with its gold colour, looks good (if that makes any difference). The very small footprint makes it ideal for general Raspberry Pi use and for specialist applications such as robotics.
Overall rating: 9/10 (it loses a point for the rebooting behaviour).
You can buy the Edimax dongle from eBuyer for £7.49 currently (1st July 2014).
