Hardware hack for Wifi?


Joined
Aug 15, 2011
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495
Location
Bristol, England
The wifi is just awful.

How is the wifi done? Is it a chip on the motherboard? With skill and a solder iron would it be possible to put a different component on?
 
I get 400 - 500kB/sec (many others with a 1GHz as well), so it's not awful - but it can have issues with certain configurations which we might be able to solve.

1. What unit do you have? How old is it?

2. What router are you using? What are your settings (Channel, encryption, etc.)

3. What is your Wifi speed?
 
With skill and a solder iron would it be possible to put a different component on?

It's not anything you can easily get at, not to mention you would need to find something that would work in it's place..


on Page 3 of the Pandora Hardware Hackers guide, It's the silver chip labeled wg721000.. All the solder points are underneath the component. you would need a reflow oven or specialized equipment to detach it and you would most likely destroy the rest of the PCB trying to detach it.
 
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The chip is the same as in the N900. No, you won't be able to replace it. I don't think I've seen any explanation why some people have absolutely no problem while others experience massive issues.

Some things to try,

1) Make sure you have the latest firmware. Notaz has put in several fixes along the way that improve things for some people.

2) Turn off power saving to the wifi chip. Open a terminal and type

sudo iwconfig wlan0 power off3) Disconnect all other wifi devices and try again. If it improves reconnect them one by one. There's been reports laptops and other devices simply overpowering the Pandora's signal.
Also of interest beyond what EvilDragon is asking for is finding out whether the slowdown is actual slowness in the chip or if it's caused by packet loss or latency.

Try pinging your router (ping <router_ip>) and see what the latency there is, then do a flood test (sudo ping -c 5000 -f <router_ip>) and see what the packet loss is.
 
Mod should change this title as it conveys that the author has a hardware hack, not that the author is asking for one.

Done.. The difference a question mark makes.
 
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Both of my units gets download speeds in the 500-700 KB/s range. That's good enough for me, since I don't even have that much bandwidth available at home (my internet provider usually caps it at 400 KB/s or so).

So far, it has worked with all access points I tried: the one at home, the ones at work (in my building and in other buildings), the wifi I get at conferences or in hotels, etc.

Your mileage may vary, but I wouldn't say it is "just awful". It is a bit limited in its range (when I'm too far from my AP at home, I get disconnected while my laptop can go a few meters further), and it's quite power-hungry compared to the current state-of-the-art, but it does the job, at least for me.
 
After removing the silver stuff on the wifi by ed and askaru i have sometimes (witht he right router) even 1 MB/s with my rebirth pandora with power saving off. Most time with power saving between 170 and 80 KB/s which is fine for me :) .
 
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^By silver stuff you mean the tape on the antenna right? Because "on the wifi" is vague are you talking about the wifi/bluetooth chip or the antenna etc..
 
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I have a 1Ghz and the wifi is also the worst of all my electronical gadget. I made a test with my open pandora on a website that test download speed, and it says I have 1.8Mbps. To compare, my smartphone(android) did the same test and had 6.9Mbps.

So my smartphone is 4 time faster than the open pandora on the same condition. The signal is also weaker than my smartphone / netbook etc...I have no problem to connect to my router in my chamber with my phone, but with the pandora it's almost impossible.

There was a lot of thread before that said that if somebody want a good signal, he should buy an usb wifi key, So this problem is not fresh news at all.

I don't think it will ever be fixed but I enjoy my pandora as it is nevertheless ;)
 
I also had absolutely lousy Wifi performance, so bad that I pretty much always had a Wifi USB dongle inserted (good bye, battery life).  But since running Pandebian I've found that the Wifi--while still the weakest of any device I've ever owned--has become good enough that I can live with just the built-in Wifi.  Presumably software improvements are trickling in somewhere?  And I think the latest Super Zaxxon (which I haven't installed) indeed featured some Wifi driver work.  So if you're not running the latest SZ, you might at least try that.  You might also put Pandebian on an SD card and see how your Wifi performs, even if you don't want to move to a Debian world for your primary OS.
 
I made a test with my open pandora on a website that test download speed, and it says I have 1.8Mbps.
That's still 220KB/s. It's not the fastest but that should be more than enough to handle single web pages in seconds. Your smartphone is actually near the top of the effective TCP transfer rate of an 802.11g connection. nix that, my numbers are off.Try some local tests as well, plus something more dynamic. I've found that while I can only get transfer rates of about 300KB/s I can transfer up to 3 files simultaneously at that rate. Downloading a bunch of large updates via PNDManager is a really good way to test the actual maximum.
 
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The chip is the same as in the N900. No, you won't be able to replace it. I don't think I've seen any explanation why some people have absolutely no problem while others experience massive issues.


Some things to try,


1) Make sure you have the latest firmware. Notaz has put in several fixes along the way that improve things for some people.


2) Turn off power saving to the wifi chip. Open a terminal and type


sudo iwconfig wlan0 power off
3) Disconnect all other wifi devices and try again. If it improves reconnect them one by one. There's been reports laptops and other devices simply overpowering the Pandora's signal.

Also of interest beyond what EvilDragon is asking for is finding out whether the slowdown is actual slowness in the chip or if it's caused by packet loss or latency.


Try pinging your router (ping <router_ip>) and see what the latency there is, then do a flood test (sudo ping -c 5000 -f <router_ip>) and see what the packet loss is.
Tried this but I got this message:

Error for wireless request "Set Power Management" (8B2C) : 

    SET failed on device wlan0;  No such device.
 
wlan0 should be the default device name for the internal wireless.. sounds like something got messed up and it went to the next available device name wlan1.. Unless you did the trick of swapping wireless device names to allow you to use an external wifi device in Android.
 
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I didn't do any trick.  This is the Rebirth got from trading my Shield.  But I reflashed/reinstalled the firmware couple times.  Is wlan0 better than wlan1 or something?
 
After removing the silver stuff on the wifi by ed and askaru i have sometimes (witht he right router) even 1 MB/s with my rebirth pandora with power saving off. Most time with power saving between 170 and 80 KB/s which is fine for me :) .
What? You mean you pulled the EMI shield from over the chip?!

And that increased speed?

Curious...

No side effects to other functions of the board, I assume?

Well, so far I've transferred everything into the Pandora over Wifi. I mean everything, including ISO images for some PC games and such stuff. A bit slow it may be, but it's done the job. Then again I'm used to leaving my devices to their own... umm... devices... (hmmm... I wonder if that went right...) while they do their transferring...

I could have swapped the SD card between source and target, but tossing stuff back and forth between my home server with smbclient is just so practical...
 
I don't know what you are talking about.

Download speed, or browsing speed.

If browsers are too slow for you then put the PND on the NAND.

Event the fast Qupzillla accesses SD-card a lot while loading pages.

Here it's (mostly, besides processor speed) the SD-speed that slows you down.
 
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