• Registered: 2008-12-01
  • Posts: 30

Topic: Wireless Reception FIXED and 802.1n question

The USB NIC is superglued into the internal USB slot of the riser card. I found the chumby cool, but poor reception made it incredibly unreliable, especially as an alarm clock. This was very frustrating and made the cumby pretty well useless to me. So I opened it up and pulled the riser card out. I then reassembled the chumby and simply plugged the NIC into a long USB extension cable.  My chumby now has perfect reception everywhere in my house, with the USB NIC hanging off the cable from the rear USB slot.

Question.... can we not replace that little USB NIC with 802.11n? Incidentally the riser serves NO PURPOSE but to move the NIC physically away from the motherboard. I tried the NIC in all 3 USB slots including the one on the motherboard and it works on all. What a waste of money! Lose the silly riser cars guys. And do we really expect worthy reception from a USB NIC that sits inside a chumby? The whole point with the Chumby is it must have reliable networking!

  • Duane
  • Duane
  • Blue Octy
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Re: Wireless Reception FIXED and 802.1n question

heinrich wrote:

Incidentally the riser serves NO PURPOSE but to move the NIC physically away from the motherboard....What a waste of money! Lose the silly riser cars guys.

If it did not serve some purpose, we would not have put it there in the first place.

In this particular case, it is related to passing FCC certification.  It serves as an RF shield for the components of the motherboard and part of the USB dongle.  The antenna of the dongle extends beyond the edge of the shield.

Your modifications may indeed work "better", but not pass FCC certification.

Duane's Website

3 Reply by heinrich (edited by heinrich 2009-02-09 17:24:53)

  • Registered: 2008-12-01
  • Posts: 30

Re: Wireless Reception FIXED and 802.1n question

The USB NIC is no different from any other USB NIC, and they routinely, by design, plug into the back of any USB parent such as a laptop. The Chumby is clearly a capable USB parent, and therefore your NIC could and can simply be plugged into the rear of the Chumby. Thank you for your explanation. It makes sense. Either way ... if you decide to, you can probably support any external USB NIC, including much faster nd much more capable NICS which would make your product much more reliable.

  • Duane
  • Duane
  • Blue Octy
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Re: Wireless Reception FIXED and 802.1n question

Obviously we don't have any exposure to what the laptop guys do, but I'm pretty sure most devices such as laptops don't go through the FCC certification with a USB WiFi dongle plugged in.  We do, since it's a intrinsic part of the product.

Right now, the cost differential between 802.11b/g and 802.11n (draft) adapters makes them cost prohibitive for use in the current chumby.  My understanding is that 802.11n requires a much larger antenna - a quick look with Google indicate that most name-brand 802.11n USB adapters are quite large.

"Faster" won't help though - as with most embedded devices, the processor in the chumby can't handle incoming data at much higher data rates than typical 802.11b rates anyway, and the MX21's USB ports are USB 2.0 "full speed" (not "high speed") so they're inherently limited as well.  So there's little point in attempting to pump more data than it can handle - it's better to maximize compatibility and minimizing uneccessary cost.  The current NIC is capable of handling streaming audio and video that the device can actually render.

Duane's Website

5 Reply by heinrich (edited by heinrich 2009-02-09 17:35:06)

  • Registered: 2008-12-01
  • Posts: 30

Re: Wireless Reception FIXED and 802.1n question

I hear ya. The reason 802.11n would be great for all is that n is becoming the standard, and I for one have to turn on -g just for the chumby ... -n is the standard that will allow us to be more secure and faster, and so -n will end up making the chumby's -g adapter not usable .... make sense? I guess what I'm saying here is, if you guys would (please) make it possible to run -n instead of -g, it would exten the useful lifespan of our chumbys. In any event, just the ability to have the NIC ourside the Chumby seems to make quite a nice reception improvement smile So even just an external -g NIC helps a lot.

  • Duane
  • Duane
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Re: Wireless Reception FIXED and 802.1n question

The rub will be the level of support that Linux currently has for 802.11n devices - at the moment, the x86 desktop Linux community is quite often running Windows drivers in a compatibility wrapper, which wouldn't work for us on ARM.

Even in b/g land, we're still limited to those NICs with high quality Linux-only drivers and there really aren't too many chipsets to choose from.  It gets that much worse in draft-n.

We'll take a look though.

Duane's Website

  • Registered: 2008-12-01
  • Posts: 30

Re: Wireless Reception FIXED and 802.1n question

Thank you Duane smile

  • Registered: 2008-12-01
  • Posts: 30

Re: Wireless Reception FIXED and 802.1n question

Duuude this thing is so much more useful now smile I love it ... no more disconnects.