For those of you wanting a handy guide to the pin outs for the Raspberry Pi GPIO there is a cheat sheet available that has been created by Pimoroni and Cyntech Components.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD

In order to make the Raspberry Pi use a Static IP Address with the wireless adapter use the following command to edit the interfaces file:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

The settings below give a Static IP Address of 192.168.1.161, make sure you have connected the wireless adapter and got a connection to your router first.

auto lo
iface lo net loopback

allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet manual
wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

iface default inet static
address 192.168.1.161
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.1.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255
gateway 192.169.1.254

Obviously these settings are for my network, make sure you use the appropriate settings for your network.