Freeplay CM3 Wifi Driver Install

[wegener.eric@gmail.com]

Hello all, this is my first pi build so bear with me.

I'm trying to install the drivers for my USB wifi-bluetooth dongle (Edimax EW-7611ULB) to use with my Freeplay CM3 build. However, all the information I can find on the web implies that either a wifi or ethernet connection is required to install such drivers. (see https://edimax.freshdesk.com/support/sol...spberry-pi). Obviously my wifi isn't working yet, and the CM3 has no ethernet, so how does that work?

I'm sure there must be a way to manually install drivers onto the image via a PC/Mac or USB thumb drive, but seeing as I'm new to this I could use some guidance. Is there a different wifi/bluetooth dongle I should have bought that works OTB without installing drivers?

Thanks so much for your time!

[Flavor]

We have that same dongle, but we mainly purchased it just to see if it worked "out of the box." It didn't.

We are looking into it. If we come up with a good way to get it up and running, we'll let you know.

[wegener.eric@gmail.com]

We have that same dongle, but we mainly purchased it just to see if it worked "out of the box."  It didn't.  

We are looking into it.  If we come up with a good way to get it up and running, we'll let you know.

Perfect, thanks so much for the info. Please do let me know if you find out anything, would be nice to have BT/Wifi but it's not necessarily a dealbreaker for my needs.

[Flavor]

We worked on this a bit last week.  From what I understand, the driver will compile on older Raspbian kernels, but it's not working (out of the "box") on the latest Raspbian/RetroPie.  That makes it pretty tricky.  I wonder if we could maybe find somewhere/someone that has this pre-built for Raspbian.

Notice that at https://edimax.freshdesk.com/support/sol...spberry-pi they call this out.
"Please note that the steps below work for kernel up to v4.4 only.  If you have updated to the latest one (v4.14 or higher), the driver compilation will fail!  At this moment, there is no workaround for this."

[Flavor]

You may also want to see the very short list of "Working Bluetooth/Wifi Combo adapters" at
https://elinux.org/RPi_USB_Bluetooth_ada...o_adapters