Have any of you successfully gotten this guy to work with your Beaglebone? I haven’t really messed with it too much yet, but I was hoping maybe someone out there has gotten it to work, so I can spend less time monkeying. 
http://www.adafruit.com/products/814
on my pcDuino it works while in direct range of wifi router. anything between them will break the signal
Pretty bad experience with this one until now: no matter whether I use a hub or connect it to the BBB’s USB, it just does not work reliably. It takes forever to get an IP, and when it does, it just does not get a good throughput - pinging the wlan0 leads to lost packets, >1s ping times, etc…
It’s a generic Realtek dongle, your mileage may vary depending on what you get. I spent a few hours on it and decided I had better things to do… I might try another one from Amazon - same sort of budget - and see how it fares.
Maybe I’ll just end up running a cable to where it needs to go.
Yes, works very reliable in Ubuntu 13.04 on BBB. Both dhcp and static ip. Couldn’t get it working in Angstrom.
@Onimo_Xyanlin did you do anything special to make it work? I simply configured it on /etc/network/interfaces as I usually do, and it talks to an Apple Airport. Or doesn’t talk, more like it. I’m using the armhf 13.03 image on http://armhf.com (http://armhf.com/index.php/boards/beaglebone-black/)
Yes, one thing. It didn’t work if I plugged it right into the board, it only works if I use an USB extension cable. Why, I don’t know.
Ah, I did not try that one - I either tried on a hub or directly on the BBB USB port. Interesting…
I can’t even get it to see the thing. 
Can you ‘see’ it with dmesg and lsusb? If so, try to bring it up with sudo ifup --force wlan0
hrmm it seems to be there but now it’s telling me the firmware is too big…
managed to get it up and seen by the system, but now it locks the board up every so often whenever it’s plugged in…
Ok so it locks the board whenever I do a copmmand that accesses the wlan in some way.
Hmm, sounds like a a monday morning module
I was just about to make a post here asking if anyone had been able to use these (or any other of those 8192cu compatible variants) when plugged directly into the BB White or Black. I’ve tried several, both from Adafruit and from nameless vendors on Ebay. When I bring them up, the machine usually freezes.
But, if I plug a powered USB hub into the Beagle and then plug the wifi into that, everything works great. I have good signal and network throughput with no system instability. But I was really hoping to have a more compact arrangement with no extra hubs.
I suspect the dongle isn’t getting as much power as it needs; I hope it isn’t actually requiring more than the 500mA usb spec (I haven’t taken a multimeter to it yet). But assuming it is, is there some way we can overdrive the usb port? Without damaging anything?
Add long as you power the beagle with a two amp 5v power supply it works fine. Now I just need to figure out how to get it set up
I’m using a 2A/5V power supply and I still have said problems.
I still have problems with a 2A power supply. Just ordered another dongle on Amazon, I’ll report here if I have more success.
@Jason, did you unplug the ethernet cable?