Pi Zero 1 doesn't recognize USB WiFi dongle

[/RaspberryPi]

Hey guys,

I still have an old RPi zero 1 (no W) lying around and wanted to use it for a small project. I bought it back in 2017 in a set with a USB OTG cable and a WiFi dongle, and I remember it working perfectly fine at the time. Back then, the Pi Imager wasn't a thing, so I flashed Raspbian Jessie and enabled ssh and wifi by creating the ssh and wpa_supplicant.conf files in /boot on the SD card.

Now, I tried to get it working again and I can't seem to get it to recognize the dongle properly.

First, I used the latest Raspberry Pi OS lite 32bit from the Pi Imager and specified my WiFi there, flashed the SD card but the WiFi wasn't working at all.

I then did the same, but with the latest Raspberry Pi OS non-lite, connected a Display and saw a "No wireless network device" tooltip when hovering over the network icon in the task bar.

Then, I downloaded an old version of Raspbian Jessie, flashed that with etcher and enabled ssh and wifi via the /boot directory as described above. Here, it actually works....sometimes:
I find this very weird, but when I connect the Zero to power, sometimes it connects to WiFi and I can see it in my router config and can connect via ssh. But after a few seconds, it disconnects again and I lose the ssh connection. I can barely enter one command, before the connection breaks aways again.
After restarting, it then doesn't connect to WiFi anymore - only after waiting for a couple of minutes and booting it again it connects for a few seconds again.

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The dongle is working perfectly fine on my laptop, the pi itself is working as well as I can see when connecting a monitor. The power supply is 5V 2A, which I think should be plenty for that application.

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Does anyone here have an idea about what's happening?
submitted by /u/Koko_San
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Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/c ... fi_dongle/