Nvidia Jetson Nano with Intel Wireless AC PCIe WiFi

Here’s how we got our Jetson Nano working reliably with an Intel Wireless AC 3165 PCIe WiFi card.

This post outlines the steps someone else used to solve this issue on the Nvidia developer forums, but the solution was spread over multiple posts whereas this one puts all those steps in one place.  Depending on what you’re using, it’ll likely involve a similar process as the Jetson should automatically detect the hardware – it just doesn’t install the driver automatically.

Here are some details about our configuration that might be relevant, particularly if you’re reading this from the future:
– Jetpack Version: 4.4.
– Clean and updated installation.
– Intel® Dual Band Wireless-AC 3165 (was also tested with an Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7265, which uses the same driver as the 3165).

You can check if your module’s driver is shared with another module by looking at this page from Intel:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005511/wireless.html

[Archived link]

1. Install your WiFi module in the slot underneath the Jetson compute module, making sure to attach the antennas.

2. Boot into your Jetson, and check the ‘Additional Drivers’ tab of the ‘Software and Updates’ window.  You should see your WiFi module name, except it’ll be greyed out and unavailable.

3. Open a terminal and type

4. Install the backport-iwlwifi-dkms

5. Add ‘pcie_aspm=off’ to the end of APPEND line in /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf. To do this, run:

Type ‘pcie_aspm=off’ at the end of the line that begins with APPEND.

Don’t copy and paste this in, this is just an example of what /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf could look like:

6. Reboot your Jetson and the driver for your WiFi module should now be detected.  If your WiFi network doesn’t appear in the list of available networks, try disabling WiFi and reenabling it.

Enjoy WiFi on your Jetson!

If this tutorial didn’t work, try our other tutorial, which involves compiling your own Linux kernel to get the Intel Wireless 9260 to work.  It’s a few years old, but it might help someone.

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