5 ghz wifi dongle plug and play for Raspberry Pi 3 B (Not B+)

I have 3 Raspberry Pi 3 B+'s that have the 5ghz wifi build in so that made my camera streaming for the octopi's much smoother, but I have 9 Raspberry Pi 3 B's (2.4Ghz wifi ONLY) thus I'm wondering if there is a full 5 ghz wifi dongle that is just plug and play (no install packages) if possible. It seems like the only one is a modmypi, but I'm not sure if that's plug and play with octopi? Thanks!

Octopi (octoprint) won't care. You just need a raspberry pi compatible dongle that supports 5GHz, and disable the on board wifi.

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Oh okay, that's good to hear, so this one will work then? https://www.modmypi.com/raspberry-pi/communication-1068/wifi-wireless-1070/wifi-dongle-dual-band-5ghz big but seems like it.

Should work oerfectly

Yeah... if you don't disable the onboard wifi you'd probably end up with problems with the default gateway settings being wrong.

that's correct so I will be disabling the onboard wifi, is this the proper way to do it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT5TSFme_Ww

I didn't watch the video (girlfriend's sitting here next to me studying)...

You wouldn't want to remove kernel support for it in the config.txt file since you'll need that for the other device: dtoverlay=pi3-disable-wifi.

There's no way to do this in sudo raspi-config, for what it's worth.

Stretch doesn't use /etc/network/interfaces now, so those sort of solutions aren't pertinent.

You want to be careful with the modprobe-related solutions because those try to remove drivers and stacks.

The best-practice solution would probably be to add a crontab entry for the root user on startup.

sudo crontab -e # Adding something like:
@reboot ip link set wlan0 down
...followed by a reboot.

With attempts like this, it's probably best to be doing this on a locally-installed keyboard/mouse/monitor on the Pi itself. Run ifconfig before/after to confirm.

Did this solution work for OP?

Currently trying to do the same thing on an rpi 3B - i.e. connect to 5GHz network using a wifi dongle (that supports 5GHz). The crontab entry @reboot ip link set wlan0 down didn't seem to have any effect, so I now have both on-board wifi and a wifi dongle connected to my 2.4GHz network.

Initially I tried the dtoverlay=pi3-disable-wifi in config.txt, which did seem to disable the on-board wifi but I also couldn't connect to anything, so I've since removed that.

I'm trying to disable on-board Wifi and connect to my 5GHz. In /etc/wpa-supplicant/wpa-supplicant.conf I have both SSIDs listed, and gave priority 1 to the 5GHz network, and priority 2 to the 2.4GHz network.

Any ideas welcome!

Honestly, wouldn't this be easier with a 3B+ (which supports 5GHz out of the box)?

Yes - but sadly I have what I have for the moment. If it does appear to be that much hassle to get it working with a dongle I can stick with the on-board Wifi.