WiFi adapter works through hub or cable but not direct

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moallen
 
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Joined: Thu Nov 08, 2012 6:23 pm

WiFi adapter works through hub or cable but not direct

Post by moallen »

This is a strange problem, although I did find a lengthy thread about it on another forum last year. The issue is my new Adafruit #814 miniature WiFi adapter works fine when connected through a powered or unpowered hub or an extension cable. It even works great when plugged into a 2" extension. But it only works maybe 5% of the time when plugged directly into my Beaglebone Black. I don't see how this could be related to power. If anything, it would have less power through an 8' USB extension cable, but it works fine.

My BBB is a A5A board. I am running it on Ubuntu 13.04 (GNU/Linux 3.8.13-bone28 armv7l). I normally power the BBB with a 2.5A 5V power supply, but I've also tried a 20A 5V bench supply.

I thought maybe the signal from the tiny adapter was being dampened somehow being plugged in so close to the BBB board, but I did a 'iwlist scan' and found the db level to be -63 with an extension and -60 w/o an extension, so no real difference.

It's hard to believe the driver could have anything to do with this problem. It just ran flawlessly the past 24 hours stuck on a 2" extension. But for what it's worth I went through a rebuild process so that I could use a RTL8192CU driver for my 3.8.13 kernel.

Any ideas - thanks?

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: WiFi adapter works through hub or cable but not direct

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

That is wierd.

The least implausible guess I have is something marginal in the physical connection between the wifi dongle and the BBB's USB port.

For the sheer heck of it, try plugging and unplugging the dongle about 10-20 times and see if that has any effect at all. If not, we'll write it off as gremlins and get you a replacement.

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dtownmaker
 
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Re: WiFi adapter works through hub or cable but not direct

Post by dtownmaker »

Interesting... similar result to this post re: WiFi about using a cable to make it work

http://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=49152

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