Bosbeetle said:
havent had problems with the wifi (yet)
Yes, the problem was mainly speed after the software fix(IIRC), tho i believe it does drop a lot of wifi packets(or something else, frames mebe), which would cause problems on a D-Link router like mine, it shts a brick after a few dropped frames..
I did hear about the piggyback resistor 'fix', but I was pretty sure it was a temporary fix. And with the speed a reviewer said, which is fine for web browsing, isn't really great if you were streaming. i've forgotten the speed he said tho, and where the post is located. Maybe he just got an 'unlucky' pandora.
EDIT: Here's what was in the dev blog:
1. The WiFi issue - finally resolved
A lot of guys have probably already followed this on the boards: notaz was working on the WiFi driver and still couldn't get it to work reliable. As he didn't know what else to try, he thought it could also be a hardware issue - of course, that got us alarmed. Michael immediately stopped the board production (700 had been produced so far back then) to first do more tests with WiFi. We were totally in the dark. If you ever wanted to know how sudden death feels... well, we do know for sure yet.
Michael did begin investigating the hardware while notaz did more tests and tweaks with the software. A kernel which disabled everything except WiFi did get a bit more speed out of the WiFi, but it still was very slow. Was it the driver causing problems when other stuff was running? Or was it the hardware? We still didn't know for sure.
As we didn't know, we decided we will get some WiFi sticks for the beginning and ask every customer whether he wanted to get the Pandora with a stick and internal WiFi that might be fixable by software or maybe needs a hardware fix later.
Then, at one time, we found out that WiFi was faster on Rev2/3 boards then on the recent Rev4/5 boards - pretty weird, as nothing had been changed in these revisions that could affect WiFi. Except the board manufacturer. Using that clue, we figured out that the impedance of one trace had been changed. The impedance is important here, as a wrong impedance will distort the signal and then the module doesn't get a clean clock. Measuring the clock signal did prove that: Yep, the impedance had been changed.
Who's fault was it? Hard to tell. The company had changed that trace without asking, but we also didn't explicitely say it needs to have a correct back. So it's a hard thing, the trace is working, it was just not good enough for the signal.
Knowing that, Michael did work on it for a couple of days, doing some trial and error (not much you can't do unless you do know the exact new impedance).
He got it working better - but still not good enough to really be usable - was this due to software? Or still hardware?
So he started to work on a new testing board (Rev6) which could also be used as new board for the rest of the 3300 Pandoras if it fixes WiFi.
While doing that, he had another idea - modded another Rev5 board and got a HUGE speed increase! On minimal kernel, he can get 350KB/s, on normal image he gets 66KB/s stable speed (tested downloading from the internet. That fix is easy: Simply piggyback a resistor on top of an existing one. Takes about 1 - 2 minutes. And the rest of the 3300 boards can be populated with the new resistor immediately, so that fix won'tl be needed on them.
Speed can probably still be improved - Michael just found out about that yesterday, he will try to tweak more (or even combine the two mods) during the next days, until he leaves for UK to start assembling (he will do the modification of each board while assembling).
Finally! That news did make us more alive again, we were really suffering during the last days...
So while it works, and 66kB in't bad for web browsing, the possible 350kB/s(which can likely go higher) speed that is possible in the minimal kernel can go higher on the full kernel. Three cheers for Michael's quick work back there tho
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