Wireless speed issues?

I’m running with bone-debian-8.6-lxqt-4gb-armhf-2016-11-06-4gb.img.xz, and my wireless connected without a problem, however at times I feel like I’m back in the 80s typing on a 300baud modem. I’ve checked log files and dmesg and see nothing. My load average seems to stay high even though I see pretty much everything is idle.

I believe I’ve found the problem to be power management on the wifi. I have found a way to disable it manually, but not a method to disable it automatically. Any ideas?

Do you mean sleep_auth? If so, I’ve also run an issue with the default value of 2 (“extreme low power”). I place this file on all my BBGW devices:

$ cat /etc/cron.d/wireless

MAILTO=“”

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

@reboot root sleep 60 ; echo 0 > /sys/kernel/debug/ieee80211/phy0/wlcore/sleep_auth

Looking through the wlcore source code, the possible values are:

  • 0 = active mode

  • 1 = low power

  • 2 = extreme low power

Stéphane

Add to file /etc/network/interfaces a line with the following context (works after reboot):

wireless-power off

Regards

At this point I don’t know what it is. I setup a cronjob to turn off wireless power management, but something else seems to be causing a crash. My SSH hangs or so so slow that I can type “ls” and walk away to make a cup of coffee and it still hasn’t done an ‘ls’, but 5 minutes later, bam, it happens.

I’ve looked in dmesg and journalctl to see if there are any messages, but nothing.

Well I do not have a BBBW, but I do have an rPI 3. Disabling power save at boot is fairly easy.

william@rpi:~$ sudo nano /etc/rc.local
Add: /sbin/iw dev wlan0 set power_save off

william@rpi:~$ sudo reboot
william@rpi:~$ iwconfig wlan0
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn Mode:Master Tx-Power=31 dBm
Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off

However, I have a sneaking suspicion that this, and all the other methods mentioned above won’t work. I’m fairly sure Robert is using some form of a network manager to handle the BBBW’s wireless, and in this case, disabling power_save will have to be done through this network manager.

I think I know what is going on, I think the BBBW uses a bit more power than the BBB, I believe the power supply that came with my 3d printer may either be faulty or at it’s limit of what it can supply. Going to look into a slightly beefier supply.

If your power supply reliably supplies 1A or more, at 5v, then that’s probably not the problem.

Is there a power supply requirement difference between the BBB and a BBBW?

The BBB works great outside of my machine connected to USB on a computer, but within the machine it hangs and crashes.

The cape powers the BBB, it has a 24v 2.7a supply. I have noticed some funny things (I have to plug it in to the wall first, then the device; it won’t start if the device is plugged in first) with the supply and am in the process of trying to acquire a new one.

/J

Is there a power supply requirement difference between the BBB and a BBBW?

You should get, and read the SRM for the BBBW. But there almost certainly
is.

The BBB works great outside of my machine connected to USB on a computer,
but within the machine it hangs and crashes.

The cape powers the BBB, it has a 24v 2.7a supply. I have noticed some
funny things (I have to plug it in to the wall first, then the device; it
won't start if the device is plugged in first) with the supply and am in
the process of trying to acquire a new one.

Is everything that needs to be isolated properly isolated ? My buddy
designed a cape for us too, which is also 24v powered, But everything is
properly isolated, and we're doing some external power management as well.

The 24v is isolated from the 5v for the BBB, I’ve found sometimes my machine is unstable and sometimes it is fine. I did pick up a 24v 6a supply and haven’t had an issue since. Also, when I plugin the supply to the wall, it can support powering up the machine as compared to the previous supply which had issues supplying whatever initial power the system needs (I didn’t design the hardware only reverse engineering it to write my own open source software).