There was some days ago a sale of an Wi-Fi adapter for old Philips smart TVs, the PTA01, for about US$0.33, and I bought some units in order to try using them as general PC Wi-Fi adapters.
Searching on WikiDev via Google, I discovered that the chipset inside this adapter is the Atheros AR9271, whose driver for Linux is the ath9k_htc.
This way, we can load the driver in the system and attribute to it the adapter’s VID PID, “0471 209e”, which we got from lsusb, as a compatible device.
The final command is:
sudo modprobe ath9k_htc
sudo echo 0471 209e | sudo tee /sys/bus/usb/drivers/ath9k_htc/new_id
Now the adapter is recognized on the system and we can use it as a normal Wi-Fi adapter.
More explanations and sources from where I got information are on the links below.
I hope to automate the process on the future and test it on other systems, and will update here with the results.
Update:
Following an idea from christianc, a Fórum Adrenaline’s user, the following script will make linux recognize and support the adapter even after rebooting the system:
echo $'#!/bin/sh \n modprobe ath9k_htc \n echo 0471 209e > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/ath9k_htc/new_id' | sudo tee /usr/local/sbin/pta01.sh
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/sbin/pta01.sh
echo $'ACTION=="add", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0471", ATTRS{idProduct}=="209e", RUN+="/usr/local/sbin/pta01.sh"' | sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/pta01-wifi.rules
sudo udevadm control --reload-rules
sudo udevadm trigger
Done.
https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Philips_PTA01
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/442833/forcing-driver-to-device-match