BPI-R4 AW7916-NPD - Feeling incredibly inept

Banana Pi Router design BPI-R4(MT7988)
1

Hello, first post here. I am (attempting to) setup my BPI-R4 with an AW7916-NPD card (until the BE14 I ordered ships). I’m using the newest snapshot booting from an SD card for now, have the mt7915e drivers and mt7916 firmware. I cannot get the wifi to work for the life of me. It detects the interfaces and phy0 and phy1, quadruple checked my network and wireless configs, but when I run iwconfig it just says “no wireless extensions”. I’ve in stalled the full WPAD so I can use WPA3 and configured that. I briefly had the 2.4ghz band up and running but started over out of frustration.

This is the iw dev output:

phy#1
>         Interface phy1-ap0
>                 ifindex 26
>                 wdev 0x100000007
>                 addr be:29:38:07:a5:e7
>                 type AP
>                 txpower 5.00 dBm
>                 multicast TXQ:
>                         qsz-byt qsz-pkt flows   drops   marks   overlmt hashcol tx-bytes        tx-packets
>                         0       0       0       0       0       0       0       0               0
> phy#0
>         Interface phy0-ap0
>                 ifindex 25
>                 wdev 0x7
>                 addr be:29:38:07:a5:e6
>                 type AP
>                 txpower 3.00 dBm
>                 multicast TXQ:
>                         qsz-byt qsz-pkt flows   drops   marks   overlmt hashcol tx-bytes        tx-packets
>                         0       0       0       0       0       0       0       0               0

I’m not sure what else to provide but let me know and I’ll provide it.

Also, I am just a little fuzzy on the 5/6ghz band on the AW7916 cards: I see it’s dual band and thought that would mean I had to choose between 5 and 6 plus 2.4ghz, but see what appear to be people referencing running 2.4ghz, 5, and 6 at the same time; is that just a misinterpretation of comments or is that possible? I know it has the DBDC but not exactly sure how that works.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

EDIT: I got the 2.4 and 5ghz wifi working, but iwconfig still shows “no wireless extensions”. The problem was I had loaded the full version of wpad and believed it contained everything but it was not compatible with the WPA3 I was trying to setup. I’m still not sure how the 6ghz works with this card if anyone has any pointers there.

2

imho the error is based on missing CFG80211_WEXT option in kernel

check /proc/config.gz for options set, not sure it is needed for working wifi, but iwconfig afair needed it

3

I thought that is sort of deprecated?

4

posssibly…but iwconfig too :slight_smile:

5

If Iwconfig is deprecated, great… I’ll just forget that part since 2.4 and 5ghz are working.

Any ideas on getting 6 up?

6

I just logged into LUCI the first time. 6ghz shows up but isn’t broadcasting.

7

Hello,

i did try get working ax hostapd with QCN9074. It looks like this 4x4 card does support only 6G band. Hostapd started succesfully, but I was not able to scan it on any QCNFA765. As I did not had time to deal with it, I am not using 9074 at this time. There could be the same root cause. If so, it is maybe hw independent issue. Do you have any other card to test?

8

Hi, Could you explain how you got it running? I’m still stuck trying to get it recognized. I’m also running the current snapshot (SNAPSHOT (r27243-dd1bfbe971)). Did you build a custom image, or were you able to install firmware and drivers afterward? I found another Thread describing the use of a custom build, but as being a new user, I’m not that deep into building custom images.

https://forum.banana-pi.org/t/bpi-r4-mt7916-6ghz-wont-start-solved/17423

Kind Regards Malte

9

Either build your own or install the needed packages.

Try using the software manager in luci to install these packages. If using the snapshot they may be available.

kmod-mt7916-firmware, kmod-mt7915e, and wpad-basic-openssl.

After you install that it should work fine.

If they aren’t available you will need to build your own. You can probably use openwrt’s firmware selector and add those packages to the build, as the page let’s you add packages you want then builds it.

10

Make sure you have both the mt7915e and mt7916 drivers installed. What broke mine was installing the WPAD full which ended up not being compatible with WPA3 encryption, but that was related to the card being recognized. My other problem was using IWCONFIG; apparently that’s deprecated so it didn’t matter that it was not showing anything.

I did get it up and running with all 3 bands going simultaneously to answer the question I asked about whether it could do 5 and 6 concurrently or if it was an either/or.