Raspberry Pi Access Point using RTL8192cu
Propeller Head Alert
There are enough tutorials around to follow for how to make a Hot-Spot or an Access Point using your Raspberry Pi so I will not go into the details in this post, however I wanted to have an access point capability without needing an external USB hub to power my wifi USB adaptor, that's right I wanted the RPi to power the wifi adaptor directly.
To achieve this goal I need one of the really small 'nano' wifi USB dongles. The cheap ones around around are often re-branded so its pointless describing using a brand name and model. however the do all use the driver described in dmesg as RTL8192cu and the other mnemonic that is often found is RTL8188CUS; if that's what you have and want to use it along with hostapd to make an access point you will realise there is something not quite right.
To cut along story short I have spent days on getting to locate the fix for this so I figured I would share and it will act as a reference source for myself going forward lest I forget. Credit for this has to go to ESR Labs although they seem so occupied with the Android Transporter that they failed to see a community struggling to find the solution they have provided see their site here.
configure the access point using hostapd as per the tutorial you are using and when you find it does not work as hostapd cannot find a nl80211 compliant device then stop copy this hostapd file from HERE and simply extract it into the same directory as your hostapd binary best to rename the original binary first (a non compressed version can be downloaded from HERE). The directory for the file is typically /usr/sbin make sure you chmod the extracted hostapd file to 755 with owner and group set to root.
Now go to /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf and comment out the line driver=nl80211 and add line driver=rtl871xdrv
reboot the RPi or at least restart hostapd (sudo service hostapd restart) and you should now have a working access point as long as the tute you are following is a good one :-)
Ciao
Paul