Using 3G Data card with Beaglebone black.

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Is it possible to use huawei E3131 Bs-1 3G Data Card with beagle bone black to access internet.

Can somebody please point to any steps or tutorials for configuring it?

Details of data card:

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Hi Sanjay,

It is possible, in many ways.

First of all, you’ll need usb-modeswitch, so the card can be recognized as serial ports.

Second you need a software that can configure your ethernet interface, for that you can use one of these:

  • sakis3g: if you google “3g + BBB”, it will lead to it, it’s an script ‘lost’ out there, through its interactive interface, you can configure the connection.
  • wvdial: it auto creates scripts for pppd. it seams to have some bugs for the arm arch, people say it works, I never get it work correctly.
  • ofono + connman: very badly documented, but it works. I find it not very stable.
  • modemmanager + networkmanager: default of most linux distros, its last version has a nice cli to create connections. I would try that.

I had many headaches trying to do that, feel free to ask and share.

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Hi Sanjay,

I had gotten Huawei E353 to work with beaglebone in a remote monitoring application. It was not straight forward to get it working.

I had used sakis3g to do the mode switching and get the BB manual connected. sakis3g does not offer a way to auto-reconnect if the connection is hung up for any reason. wvdial will keep a connection up. Google around and you might be able to find examples specific to your service provider. For example: http://www.yantrr.com/wiki/Sample_wvdial.conf_file. Remember you need to do mode switching before starting wvdial.

There is a USB reliability issue that is fixed in kernel after around 3.12. Back when I was running 3.2 kernel on the Beaglebone, it would eventually unable to reconnect after a few weeks (at least the data continue to get logged). On 3.8 kernel, there would be kernel panic after just a few days and system stayed in hung state until someone could reset it. System stability improved big time since we switched to 3.15 kernel a few months ago. I might switch to the 3.14-ti kernel the next time I get to work on it. Depending on what else you do on your BB or BBB, you may also need to customize am335x-bone.dtb or am335x-boneblack.dtb to get the pin configuration you need on >3.8 kernel. See http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:Capes_3.8_to_3.14#Custom_dtb.