Pine A64+ and TP-Link AC600 usb wireless adapter

[Andro]

I believe the TP-Link AC600 wireless usb adapter uses the Mediatek chipset. Has anybody got this running on a Pine A64?

[Xalius]

I have checked on the BSP kernel and mainline, it seems MT7610U drivers and firmware are generally out of tree. Did you try and build that module out-of-tree and load the firmware?

[Andro]

After some work I now have this usb wireless device working just fine. For others looking to use it, here's a brief synopsis of what I did, running Armbian 5.32 for Pine64, kernel 3.10.105-pine64, and building directly on the PineA64, not in the Ubuntu Armbian user build system.

 

Obtain the most recent, fixed driver source from:

 

https://github.com/xtknight/mt7610u-linksys-ae6000-wifi-fixes

 

To get the built module to load properly, you have to correct the value UTS_RELEASE to add -pine64 in the linux headers file:

/usr/src/linux-headers-3.10.105-pine64/include/generated/utsrelease.h

change

#define UTS_RELEASE "3.10.105"

to:

#define UTS_RELEASE "3.10.105-pine64"

Make and make install. The kernel module that gets built and installed and loaded is mt7610u_sta. This can be confusing as the device is referred to as the RT2870STA, but it uses the Mediatek chip and driver.

 

To provide enough kernel memory for the module to load, add coherent_pool=6M to the line setenv bootargs in /boot/boot.cmd and regenerate boot.scr int he usual way. 

 

To configure, one way is to edit the file:

/etc/Wireless/RT2870STA/RT2870STA.dat

The file README_STA_usb in the source tree describes all the configuration values in quite good detail.

 

The device will appear as ra0 and can be set up as per any normal internet connection from /etc/network/interfaces, and so on.

 

I have probably left out some steps here, but the gist of how to do this should be clear.

 

I am a newcomer to Armbian user builds, so I am not sure how to do this out of tree and provide this code at the user build stage, but I will look into that. On reflection what I did is probably entirely the wrong way to go about this, but I hope this information is useful one way or another. At the very least it proves that this excellent usb wireless adapter works nicely with the Pine A64.