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I am looking at adding a WiFi interface to an embedded linux platform which only has a provision for a USB device. I have purchased a WGM110 starter kit and also own a Raspberry Pi ( and one other mini PC that has a Linux OS install) and looking at doing if it would be possible using these devices first.

My problem is I can't seem to figure out where to start with what I want to do. Basically what I would like is:

  • disable the WiFi on my Raspberry Pi
  • plug in the WGM110 kit USB to my RPi and turn it into a WiFi network interface

just to prove that the WGM110 is suitable for what I want to do. I can see that from the datasheet of the WGM110 it should show up as a Virtual COM port but cannot seem to figure out how this would be turned into a WiFi network interface? I have checked the /dev/ttyACM* path is added, and dmesg logs the WGM110 kit I have plugged in as of USB CDC ACM type.

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The WGM110 module has a completely separate WiFi and TCP/IP networking stack of its own: you cannot really "turn it into a WiFi network interface" under Linux TCP/IP stack as such.

Instead, the WGM110 operates as a "networking sub-processor": you send it commands using its own BGAPI command language, either directly or using the BGLib library in your application, to tell it what you wish done, and get back BGAPI responses and events containing data from the remote end-points of any established network connections.

(You can even load a BGScript into WGM110 to make it e.g. read incoming data from WGM110's UART or SPI ports and periodically establish a network connection to a particular destination and send the data there, making it a completely stand-alone "serial-to-network adapter" for a serial-connected sensor or similar.)

To use the WGM110 with any Linux networking application, you would have to essentially re-write the application to use the BGAPI/BGLib calls instead of networking-related Linux system calls.

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  • Okay thanks for the answer. So it looks like what I am thinking of doing is not possible with the kit I have...bummer. What would I need to purchase for what I am wanting to do? I am now a bit confused as to what the WGM110 is really for (I am guessing just embedded systems only and not an embedded Linux device).
    – user1397215
    Jan 5, 2020 at 21:35
  • My use case is to provide an alternative to the ethernet port on my embedded Linux device that can access the web server. So instead of doing it via the ethernet port, if I am connected to the device via WiFi, I can access the http server on my device as well.
    – user1397215
    Jan 5, 2020 at 23:35
  • Yes, WGM110 is intended for devices that are too small to run a full-featured operating system like Linux; for example, Arduinos and such. I don't see why you can't use a regular USB WiFi adapter? (Just pick one that can be handled by the drivers included in the standard kernel if your embedded Linux has a processor architecture other than x86; that generally means avoiding ones with Broadcom chips unless you can verify the exact chip model used before buying.)
    – telcoM
    Jan 6, 2020 at 11:12
  • The use case has a strict temp range requirement and I ended up with the WGM110 based on looking at it from its datasheet. I could not find a WiFi dongle for the temp range I need. So it seems the kit I have bought is useless unless I can write a proxy application that "serves" a web server as some TCP stream (would also need to figure out the rest of the TCP interaction, and from looking at TCP it is a chatty protocol).
    – user1397215
    Jan 6, 2020 at 21:20

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