One problem I've seen with BeagleBone is that WiFi dongles seem to get 
electrical interference problems when plugged directly into the 
BeagleBone...using a USB extension cord seems to fix that.  AFAIK, this 
problem causes unreliability in all chipsets...so if you have it basically 
working - but unreliable - then adding an extension cable might help. 
 After all, we're dealing with radio signals here - and antenna 
interference is a big deal.  Most uses of WiFi dongles are OUTSIDE the 
metal case of a PC or laptop - where the metal helps to shield the antenna 
from R/F junk being emitted by the computer chips...maybe just putting some 
distance between the BeagleBone and the antenna helps.

  -- Steve


On Saturday, January 25, 2014 7:06:51 PM UTC-6, Harry May wrote:
>
> Thank you for all the information.
>
> This is my experience with reliable wifi. This took me 4 days and 4 
> night(mares):
>
> I had all kinds of problems. Maybe the most important is that the 
> Micro-USB-Stick N150 (Netgear) does not work reliably. It was possible to 
> setup a WiFi connection
> but it broke down all the time.
> The much more stable hardware is the stick described by Carl Johnson in 
> his first post (the bigger size netgear stick using the ath9k_htc driver).
>
> I had no luck with Angstrom, the wifi stick was recognized and a dhcp 
> request startet, but succeeded only 1 of 10 times.
>
> So I ended up with Ubuntu saucy:
>
> http://rcn-ee.net/deb/rootfs/saucy/ubuntu-13.10-console-armhf-2014-01-24.tar.xz
> and the instructions from this site:
> http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu (Debian or Ubuntu is the same 
> procedure)
>
> To setup the stick I modified /etc/network/interfaces:
> auto wlan0
> iface wlan0 inet dhcp
>     wpa-ssid "MYSSID"
>     wpa-psk "MYPASSPHRASE"
>
> and the same for WLAN1 !!!!
> I found out that changing from one stick to another may switch from wlan0 
> to wlan1, even if you power off.
>
> And tested it according:
>
> http://embeddedprogrammer.blogspot.de/2013/01/beaglebone-using-usb-wifi-dongle-to.html
> as Carl already suggested.
>
> Everything worked fine, so I removed the LAN cable and rebooted the bone.
>
> Now comes the important thing: WAIT at least 2 to 3 minutes.
> It takes 2:30 minutes until the blue LED on the stick gets lit.
> For any reason I don't know: at a later time it booted MUCH faster.
>
> I checked my DHCP router when the bone requested the IP.
> Then it took some more time until I was able to SSH into the board via 
> wifi.
> But after that time all went really nice. To test the wifi link I copied a 
> 100MB file repeatedly until 100 GB were copied.
> All went well.
> My WLAN router can do 54Mbit, but iwconfig showed 15Mbit only. I have no 
> idea why, but I am happy that all works well so 15M is good enough
> for all my needs.
>
> This setup needs 650 MB on my SD card.
>
> What I learned in these 4 night and days:
> * use ubuntu (not Angstrom)
> * use saucy (not raring, I did not get it working with raring)
> * never use these tiny N150 micro sticks.
>
> Harry
>
>

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