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Orange Pi Zero Wireless - It is usable IRL


aliceander

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I just ordered a couple of Orange Pi Zero systems to use in small IoT projects. 

 

Reading the forum I see the wireless for Orange Pi Zero might have issues. But some of the posts wanted to use it as an AP.  That's not my case,  I'll test them when they get here, but just how bad is it?  I will not have a heavy load, but I would like something stable. When push comes to shove should I plan on using an Ethernet cable rather than the wifi? 

 

 

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Regarding CPU power, Opi0 is a decent board. It is usable on a short distance for transferring small chunks of data since transfer speed over on board WiFi chip is low. If your use scenario meets that, you will be fine, otherwise just use Ethernet or attach some high powered (2000mW) USB wireless card like this one:  :D:P and wireless range will be extremely long.

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I'm interested in low volume short distances so I might be able to use the on-board wireless.  If I have trouble I'll run an Ethernet cable. 

 

My gawd, some of those devices are HUGE compared to the tiny zero.  In fact it might be possible to put the zero inside the alfa's housing. lol 

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I did some tests yesterday the mainline kernel hostap with ESP8266 client.

Sadly it seems that the wireless is totally unreliable at least on the AP mode.

 

Sometimes the client can't even connect to the AP network as the kernel spams the error messages.
I don't know why generic laptops or mobile devices work better perhaps they have better network stack coding or have more powerfull antennas as they do not seems to have trouble getting the actual connection but fail on traffic use sometimes

Only thing that seems to help is to restart the hostAP processes but as there is not really an option I am dropping Orange Pi Zero from my potential test devices.
Perhaps it can be used as client machine with lan-connection but its not my initial goal...

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Am I missing something here?  I am not interested in making this an AP, just a end node device on my network which has nothing to do with being an AP.  Right?  One of the other threads in this forum made it clear that this is not an appropriate device for an AP, and they pointed out a site that could be used to find one.  Why does the conversation keep coming to AP with this device.  It's LOW END!  Did I misunderstand? 

 

I'm interested in using this in home IoT projects and would like to send send receive some commands and data over my home wifi.  I'm not using it as a tool to improve my network infrastructure, nor do I think that's it's design goal.  I used to add a USB wifi connector to my old raspberry pi's -- maybe I could do that with this if it's on-board wifi is not usable.

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Alexander, you are talking about Real Life test.

 

So let's talk about my experience. I've installed Logitech Media Server and Squeezelite on the little OPZ, using RJ45. The OPZ get the music files across the LAN on a NAS. Because of very bad reputation, I did not even try the wifi. Following your question I've just tested the wifi IRL.

 

So right now I am using Wifi only on the OPZ. The OPZ is running Debian Jessie with fresh upgrade:

- playing the music (server and player in the same time),

- with SSH showing armbianmonitor

- web browser on my PC pointing to the http LMS address allowing me to pause, stop, play, change volume...

- during an LMS indexing new music

 

There is no numbers here, just doing many things in the same time IRL and it seems to work.

 

Edit: some figures... Home lan is 100Mb on RJ45 and LMS indexation with OPZ with RJ45 is around 5 minutes. It took near 15 minutes with the WIFI.

 

The server has finished scanning your media library.
Total Time: 00:14:57 (Monday 6 February 2017 / 19:13)

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 The OPZ get the music files across the LAN on a NAS. [...]

 

So right now I am using Wifi only on the OPZ. The OPZ is:

- playing the music (server and player in the same time),

- with SSH showing armbianmonitor

- web browser on my PC pointing to the http LMS address allowing me to pause, stop, play, change volume...

- during an LMS indexing new music

 

To add some information to your experiences. OPi Zero Wi-Fi is single antenna low power/performance Wi-Fi in 2.4 GHz band. In crowded areas most of the 'performance possible' depends on the environment around (how many neighbours running also 2.4 GHz networks, which channels/bands used, interference with eg. microwave ovens, how many users/devices are actively consuming bandwidth).

 

I let NetSpot Pro (the free version is already ok for this purpose) run at my location for 48 hours: 139 Wi-Fi networks in total detected, just 14 in 5 GHz band (that was with a MacBook Pro making use of multiple good antennas, with the better of those cheap SBC Wi-Fi implementations only ~40 nets are detected). It started 2-3 years ago that the laptop we use in the kitchen wasn't able to play 'normal' Youtube videos in the evening hours. It's running OS X but is a 'PC laptop' (read as: usually low performance Wi-Fi) and I had to discover that's due to 2.4 GHz band becoming pretty unusable especially in the evening when everyone around uses also Wi-Fi extensively. At my location 2.4 GHz with somewhat reasonable throughput/latency only works during the night and somewhat during the day but not in the evening (any more).

 

That's important to keep in mind since if you're not the only one using the available Wi-Fi channels performance in 2.4 GHz band might depend more on everything around you than your own equipment (it's shared media and not a dedicated cable of known quality).

 

Adding to that XR819 Wi-Fi in OPi Zero might just be the new definition of low end (for some technical insights look in this thread and search forum for @dgp comments) and currently there is one issue with the driver used: High rate of TX retransmissions that affect performance/latency negatively of packets sent by OPi Zero (RX is the other direction). No one ever will touch the legacy kernel variant of this driver, for the mainline version we'll see probably a fix sometimes in the future that addresses the TX retransmits. Then Wi-Fi 'performance' with this device will improve from 'total crap' to 'just crap' :)

 

So regarding your above scenario you mostly use RX (loading media files from the NAS, indexing) -- in TX direction just some HTTP requests happen. Also it depends on your media files. If you use MP3 files with 128 kbps bitrate then of course a Wi-Fi connection providing somewhat stable 200 Kbits/sec (that's not 200 kbps) will suffice since every media streaming/playing software uses buffering, analyzes throughput/latency when starting to stream and the better ones increase buffer sizes automagically (leading to a longer delay before you can hear something) if they measure drops or very low bandwidth available.

 

So when you use 'audio streaming' as test case everything depends on the file formats (and media codecs) you use. If you would choose lossless formats like AIFF and WAV for example instead of MP3 then poor Wi-Fi performance can become a showstopper since bitrates are way too high. Regarding 'indexing new music' it matters also which format you use: AIFF for example supports the same ID3v2 tags as MP3 does so indexing when it's only about metadata might be as fast as with MP3 even if the files need way more space on disk (and available bandwidth to be transmitted over the network).

 

@aliceander: Since you're one of the few people trying to use the OPi Zero as intended ('small IoT projects') Wi-Fi should suffice. Just don't expect wonders regarding bandwidth and distance though the latter can be somewhat fixed using a better antenna -- that might cost multiple times more than the Zero -- and of course by using an appropriate AP. But for 'small IoT projects' it should be already fine and 'performance' in TX direction might improve over time with the mainline kernel once a kind soul took the time to start a wireless sniffer, analyzes the problem in TX direction and codes the necessary fix.

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Dear tkaiser,

 

Thanks a lot for your information. I use only FLAC, mostly in 16 bits 44KHz. I do not pretend anything more that what I've seen at home. If wifi is very important for some people, why not use a wifi / usb dongle?

 

Another point. Few weeks ago I started to read the forum. I think there are here some very high skilled technologist on the forum, the kind of people that do not like too much repeat and repeat and repeat the same answers.

 

And my feeling is now, because of the OPZ growing success (and armbian best system for the card), more and more people are arriving in the forum. Then you will face to more and more questions, maybe already answered. And because you are IT guys and not specialist in pedagogy, OPZ wil be the beginning of a kind of new experience for you.   

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Hi

Using gqrx to decode FM stereo i found that it sometimes took about 1 minute to get a decent audio.

It is a very CPU intensive process.

During that time the CPU frequency varied a lot before stabilizing to maximum.

This problem disappeared by switching to performance mode.

May be it would be a good idea to do that for testing WLAN performance too.

There are cases of interference caused by USB3 may be the CPU clock can interfere too.

Is there a command that can fix the CPU frequency on the fly ?

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May be it would be a good idea to do that for testing WLAN performance too.

 

In case you want to test/benchmark performance of any Wi-Fi also controlling this part of the 'environment' is mandatory of course (same with going into a shielded lab where no other interferences are present, checking channel settings of the AP used and all the other stuff no one does when providing 'benchmark numbers').

 

But why testing/benchmarking this? It's low end and numbers will always be worse. It's an IoT device and there Wi-Fi capabilities fit.

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