Beta Wifi Betatest

[EvilDragon]

Not only the WiFi module manufacturer is working on helping us to solve any issues, notaz also spent A LOT of time (kudos!) to work around some bugs the WiFi firmware has.

Therefore, here is a PND with a new driver / WiFi module firmware for the brave ones to test out.

What should be better:

Disconnects / complete stalls shouldn't happen anymore.
The driver will slow down a bit instead of stalling / disconnecting but will speed up shortly after again.

Some users who had completely unusable WiFi might see it magically working now (I know it worked for some).


What is NOT changed:

Speed. Usually, if the driver works fine, it should be between 400 and 600kB/sec, depending on some other things.

If you have way slower speeds, try to change the channel on your router - that seems to solve this issue in most of the cases.


Remember that this driver / firmware is BETA.

It might lock up the unit so a hard reset is needed!
However, the more reports we can get from back you, the better.

If you want to try it, please download this PND.

When you run it, you can either install the new driver or revert back to the old one. Please restart after installing the driver before you use it.

 

[jonlad1]

Good to know all this is happening behind the scenes, cheers Ed/Notaz

 

[WizardStan]

The only apparent difference between power save on and power save off now is that power save on takes a second or two to "warm up", going slow and dropping a lot of packets during the initial burst of traffic. Once it had been transferring for a few seconds, transfer speed and ping time were both basically the same between power off and power on: 300KB/s and 20ms respectively.
With power save on, if left idle for a minute or two, it then reduces the power again such that the next burst drops a bunch of packets again, but once it's going, it's full speed with no problems. I don't know if this was an intentional part of the update, but it is definitely a very good thing. I no longer have to turn off power save in order to get reasonable ping times!
Other than that, it performs exactly the same as it did previously for me, but I wasn't one of the ones complaining. At the very least, I think it's reasonable to say it shouldn't make things worse for those already experiencing good connections.

 

[notaz]

Good for you, for me it's slow regardless of PM or time transfers are running.

BTW there is a console tool to play with (needs latest driver):
http://notaz.gp2x.de/tmp/wlstat

quick annotation:
fcs_err - frame check errors, i.e. amount of packets received that module thought are corrupted and dropped
plcp_er - number of corrupted PLCP headers
valid - valid packets received
retry - number of transmit retries
touts - number of transmit timeouts - module failed to send the packet for too long and had to drop it
reqs - number of packets we asked module to send

 

[skeezix]

This one seems a little slower for me in general relative to previous betas, but stability might be improved. The last one was reasonably solid for me as well, but I have not seen _any_ drops with this one, which is pretty remarkable for me.

jeff

 

[Stouffa]

I'm running this new driver, now my wifi turns on automatically upon booting up the Pandora. I don't really need wifi on most of the time, how can I go about stopping this starting up every time?

 

[mcobit]

I'm running this new driver, now my wifi turns on automatically upon booting up the Pandora. I don't really need wifi on most of the time, how can I go about stopping this starting up every time?

Settings-Startup-Enable/Disable Services on boot.

 

[Stouffa]

I'm running this new driver, now my wifi turns on automatically upon booting up the Pandora. I don't really need wifi on most of the time, how can I go about stopping this starting up every time?

Settings-Startup-Enable/Disable Services on boot.

When I go into my startup options, I can't find this enable/disable services on boot? I've turned off the network manager in startup, but the wifi still turns on during bootup, but the network manager is then absent from the toolbar...

 

[mcobit]

I'm running this new driver, now my wifi turns on automatically upon booting up the Pandora. I don't really need wifi on most of the time, how can I go about stopping this starting up every time?

Settings-Startup-Enable/Disable Services on boot.

When I go into my startup options, I can't find this enable/disable services on boot? I've turned off the network manager in startup, but the wifi still turns on during bootup, but the network manager is then absent from the toolbar...

Please read, what I wrote. The Menuentry in the "Setting" menu is "STARTUP"!!!!!! Not Sessions and Startup!

 

[Twiitcher]

Installed, rebooted, functionality seems good, connecting to Linksys router yields good stable connection, quick download of youtube 11mb video via minitube worked with no hiccups. Connection to wifi still no Ad-hoc support, but via bluetooth on cyanogen rom rooted mytouch gave speedtest of 893 kbps d/l speeds, seems better than previously, not sure if it's 3g or the driver giving the better number. Disabling on startup was an available option.

I'll continue to run it and watch for anomalies, but it seems as good, perhaps better and more stable. Appreciation for all the tireless work by all you devs, can't thank you enough.


Twiitcher

 

[Stouffa]

I'm running this new driver, now my wifi turns on automatically upon booting up the Pandora. I don't really need wifi on most of the time, how can I go about stopping this starting up every time?

Settings-Startup-Enable/Disable Services on boot.

When I go into my startup options, I can't find this enable/disable services on boot? I've turned off the network manager in startup, but the wifi still turns on during bootup, but the network manager is then absent from the toolbar...

Please read, what I wrote. The Menuentry in the "Setting" menu is "STARTUP"!!!!!! Not Sessions and Startup!

Apologies, my comprehension skills are a bit lacking at 5am of a Monday morning! Worked like a charm, thanks for the help!!

 

[j.pickens]

I had several problems with the beta.

First, when tapping the power switch to "low power" mode, the WiFi LED stays lit, I assume it doesn't shut down WiFi during power save.

Second, when doing "log off > shutdown", the Pandora freezes with either a blinking cursor of death, or the Pandora Logo shutdown screen frozen.
Have to remove the battery to reboot.

Third, having occasional lockups, with frozen cursor and no keyboard response. Again, battery removal to reboot.

I used the Beta PND version selector to switch back to HF4's version, and this behavior ceased.

I also saw no increase in speeds, and the same occasional disconnects I've been experiencing in the past.
I'll get bursts of up to 300+KB/sec when first downloading a file or a youtube video with minitube, then it bogs down to 40 t0 60 kBps.

Other linux and windows PC's on the same WiFi router are getting over 1.2MB/sec downloads routinely.

It is a Linksys WRT54G with WrT firmware tested on multiple channels.

 

[mcobit]

I had several problems with the beta.

First, when tapping the power switch to "low power" mode, the WiFi LED stays lit, I assume it doesn't shut down WiFi during power save.

Second, when doing "log off > shutdown", the Pandora freezes with either a blinking cursor of death, or the Pandora Logo shutdown screen frozen.
Have to remove the battery to reboot.

Third, having occasional lockups, with frozen cursor and no keyboard response. Again, battery removal to reboot.

I used the Beta PND version selector to switch back to HF4's version, and this behavior ceased.

I also saw no increase in speeds, and the same occasional disconnects I've been experiencing in the past.
I'll get bursts of up to 300+KB/sec when first downloading a file or a youtube video with minitube, then it bogs down to 40 t0 60 kBps.

Other linux and windows PC's on the same WiFi router are getting over 1.2MB/sec downloads routinely.

It is a Linksys WRT54G with WrT firmware tested on multiple channels.

You know that you don't have to pull out the battery to reset, do you?

Ah, and I had a hangup, too. But don't know if it's WIFI related.
Else the driver works the same as the old one for me. Still high starting speeds and then the transferspeed is going down.
I never had connection problems, so I can't say something about this.

 

[j.pickens]

You know that you don't have to pull out the battery to reset, do you?

When my Pandora locks up, I can't get it to reset without battery removal.
How do you get the reset to occur?

 

[Bosbeetle]

You know that you don't have to pull out the battery to reset, do you?

When my Pandora locks up, I can't get it to reset without battery removal.
How do you get the reset to occur?

Pandora button + switch to the right

 

[Stouffa]

ON my normal landline broadband, I have no problems connecting to my Pandora, and have download speeds up to my maximum download speed (400k). Yesterday I got a O2 Hotspot for occasional use out and about at weekends, but can't get my Pandora to connect for more than 1 minute or 2 before it drops the connection and has to reconnect. My laptop, phone and ipod connect flawlessly to the Hotspot. I've already tried changing the router channels to 6 and 11, as per recommendations elsewhere on here, but it hasn't made any difference. Are there other setting I need to change, or is this all part of the wifi beta experience?

 

[WizardStan]

The fact that it was working fairly well before should definitely be encouragement that it is not a hardware problem as some have feared but really is some incompatibility thing going on with different routers.
Maybe one day we'll figure out exactly what that incompatibility is
But yeah, every beta wifi driver seems to bring things one step closer. ED has actually sent a Pandora to the chip manufacturers to see if they can't help figure out what is going wrong, so just more patience I guess.

 

[Pleng]

I honestly think it's a mix of hardware, software and QC during assembly.

My first Pandora could browse the web, but not download anything more than a couple of megs (slowly ground to a halt then failed). My second Pandora was awful even for web browsing. My current Pandora browses and downloads quite well, though it's not by any means fast.

 

[andrewroth]

Thanks for putting the work into this driver.

It's actually much improved for me! I'm happy. I used to get disconnects all the time and then even manually reconnecting wouldn't work. I would have to install the latest hotfix patch over top again, then sometimes it would work. Now, it does seem to get disconnected still, and doesn't manually reconnect, but when I make it reconnect, it works. So that is an improvement for me, I'm fine with telling it to reconnect sometimes because it works right away after that. I'm sure the driver will only continue to be improved.

 

[Stouffa]

ON my normal landline broadband, I have no problems connecting to my Pandora, and have download speeds up to my maximum download speed (400k). Yesterday I got a O2 Hotspot for occasional use out and about at weekends, but can't get my Pandora to connect for more than 1 minute or 2 before it drops the connection and has to reconnect. My laptop, phone and ipod connect flawlessly to the Hotspot. I've already tried changing the router channels to 6 and 11, as per recommendations elsewhere on here, but it hasn't made any difference. Are there other setting I need to change, or is this all part of the wifi beta experience?

today's update: Just rolled back the driver back to the previous one, and I don't seem to have the regular disconnects to my O2 Hotspot. Not done much testing than that, I need to add credit to it to do that first!