Yes, this is true. On the BPi-R3 there are two 4T4R WiFi 6 frontends:
MT7975N for 2.4 GHz
MT7975PN for 5 GHz
SinoVoip could have used MT7976A instead of the MT7975PN, that would support both 5 GHz and 6 GHz band. However, this is not the case, at least not on my V1.0 board. Also, even in that way the board would only support either 5 GHz or 6 GHz, while for an AP/Router you’d want them both.
So ideally you would have another MT7916E+MT7976A combination sitting in the PCIe bus, but I didn’t find any modules sold with that combination yet. So I resorted to MT7921 which is very available as it is used in many laptops. But it is only 2T2R and doesn’t support the wireless offloading features of the MT7986 SoC.
Shoot, that’s a disappointment. I was under impression 6e was supported OOB. It was the primary reason I bought this board. Their marketing is very misleading if lack of 6e support turns out to be the case.
I have a production board and the openwrt snapshot and the sinovoip images in the wiki do not make the neither wifi to appear in the ifconfig, what should I do to try to debug it?
Can you explain and document what didn’t work with the installation via the U-Boot menu?
If the switch controlling the SPI chip-select is in the correct position selecting either SPI-NAND or SPI-NOR, the corresponding installation option in U-Boot should work and the board should boot from that once the switches controlling the bootstrap pins are in position to select either SPI-NAND or SPI-NOR flash. If there is a problem with the installation routine on V1.1 or later boards, I would definitely like to fix that, but I only got a V1.0 board myself.
If you are running OpenWrt, you can instruct the bootloader to carry out installation upon the next reboot. In this way you won’t need the serial console connected.
I’m sorry to say that U-Boot 2022.07-OpenWrt-r20814-2ad949b11d (Oct 02 2022 - 09:39:13 +0000) works, while the current snapshot with ( ( ( OpenWrt ) ) ) [SD card] U-Boot 2022.07-OpenWrt-r20867-ee38573093 (Oct 05 2022 - 17:16:52 +0000) fail:
( ( ( OpenWrt ) ) ) [SD card] U-Boot 2022.07-OpenWrt-r20867-ee38573093 (Oct 05 2022 - 17:16:52 +0000)
1. Run default boot command.
2. Boot system via TFTP.
3. Boot production system from SD card.
4. Boot recovery system from SD card.
5. Load production system via TFTP then write to SD card.
6. Load recovery system via TFTP then write to SD card.
7. Install bootloader, recovery and production to NOR.
8. Install bootloader, recovery and production to NAND.
9. Reboot.
a. Reset all settings to factory defaults.
0. U-Boot console
Press UP/DOWN to move, ENTER to select, ESC/CTRL+C to quit
spi-nand: spi_nand spi_nand@1: Winbond SPI NAND was found.
spi-nand: spi_nand spi_nand@1: 128 MiB, block size: 128 KiB, page size: 2048, OOB size: 64
jedec_spi_nor spi_nor@0: unrecognized JEDEC id bytes: 00, ef, aa
'spi-nand0' is now active device
* spi-nand0
- device: spi_nand@1
- parent: spi@1100a000
- driver: spi_nand
- type: NAND flash
- block size: 0x20000 bytes
- page size: 0x800 bytes
- OOB size: 64 bytes
- OOB available: 24 bytes
- 0x000000000000-0x000008000000 : "spi-nand0"
- 0x000000000000-0x000000080000 : "bl2"
- 0x000000080000-0x000000380000 : "factory"
- 0x000000380000-0x000000580000 : "fip"
- 0x000000580000-0x000008000000 : "ubi"
Press ENTER to return to menu
This can happen if there are still left-overs of previous things on the SD card. Try wiping all partition/filesystem headers before writing the OpenWrt sdcard image:
But does the MT7975PN as AP mode works in 5 GHz or 6GHz? If it does work with just one band at a time I can live with it for now…
Did you hear about the Pineapple 6 M.2 key B+M radio card It is supposed to works in 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 6 GHz at the same time, I’m thinking about it now since you told that the MT7975PN won’t work with 5 and 6 GHz at the same time…
I guess i’m not able to test this as this needs a clean environment (no other wifi-ap), a optimized config to use all posssible channels in both bands and a wifi-client which can handle this and the speed too. I only do my work in private free time and have first and last. Maybe @dangowrt can test this