seandepagnier

what about mounting the flash as a filesystem?

I notice there is a 16mb spi flash on the bottom of my orange pi zero. I read it is possible to boot off it. Has anyone done it, and is it useful? Is it possible to run without the sd card? I am interested in locking the sdcard to read only for reliability during power loss, and storing application configuration data to the spi flash if possible. Can it be mounted with a filesystem, or is it better to use a ramdisk and store it periodically to flash?

I do not care about speed or range. 1mbit is already 10x what I need and 10 meter range is fine. The driver is simply unreliable. It often hangs for 30 seconds or more with no traffic possible. This is a problem. There is no problem with edimax wifi on usb. I had the same problem on the nanopi neo. I think it's the same wifi. What alternative boards have builtin wifi? I use also the raspberry zero W and it works well, but it cost a lot more because of shipping and limit 1 per order. Are there any usb dongles that support AP mode? The edimax one is very expensive, it cost the same as the OP zero.

I realize the wifi is disabled in mainline kernel... What I don't understand is why when I booted the latest kernel, and then boot the older kernel wifi still doesn't work again. Which board would you suggest for better wifi? I had similar problems with nanopi neo air, plus other problems. Which wifi dongle is good? I have edi max but it's expensive. The cheaper ones don't work as an access point.

to repeat my experiment, after booting the 4.11.7 with wifi, issue: apt update apt upgrade This installs a very slightly newer kernel When you reboot then wifi is permanently broken on that orange pi zero Any clue what the cause is? Is the firmware in the wifi corrupted? How can I tell? As for the onboard wifi, why is no one willing or able to work on the driver? I don't need good throughput on wifi, so speed is not important. I think it works fine so long as it always has traffic. Otherwise it seems to timeout and not work for a while, maybe the power management is the issue?

I have two orange pi zero H2+ boards. Using kernel 3.4 they get very hot, and wlan0 also is not very stable. I upgraded to version 4.11 kernel using Armbian_5.32_Orangepizero_Ubuntu_xenial_dev_4.11.7.img. I was able to have a much cooler orangepi, and also wlan0 appears in iwconfig. I ran "apt update" and "apt upgrade" When I boot the upgraded kernel wlan0 does not appear. I reimaged the sdcard again using the above image, but now wlan0 still is no longer there. I switched to my other orange pi, and wlan0 works. I won't upgrade the kernel and run it on this orange pi. I now have one orange pi with wifi, and one without. It won't even work with the 3.4 kernel. Somehow upgrading the 4.11.7 kernel and booting that kernel permanently broke the wlan0 in one of my orange pi, is there any way to get it back again?