With all the issues Im having with the BE1400 WiFi7 card, it’s got me wondering if there are any other miniPCIe cards that work more reliably without needing special patches or proprietary drivers?
We have test automation with several wifi cards connecting to WiFi 7 AP.
This seems more like a list of client wifi devices. IM looking for wifi cards that I can use to replace the BE1400 as the access point.
It’s an (semi automated) WiFi performance report (in client mode, yes) depending on the kernel and the driver. This is changing also in more / most expensive hardware.
Harder problem. I can only tell that we won’t be doing AP mode tests anytime soon, but if someone has a desire, hardware is in place, test system is open source and “just” need to be configured differently.
Another good resource for wireless networking in Linux is:
In the early days of r4 i tried 2 of them in both slots before i got my r4 wifi cards. But tried only detection by pci bus,not driver level,but should be fine as they are supported by mt76 mainline driver.
That might be an option then if I can find them for a good price. Because the BE1400 is turning into a nightmare.
The tx_power patch has been sitting on the OpenWRT GitHub since February without being implemented. So if I want to actually use my BPI-R4 “as-is” Im going to have to compile OpenWRT myself…Not to mention my original goal was to run Ubuntu with SPR and not OpenWRT lol.
Now I’m hearing talk of a new wifi nic coming (BE1900) so Mediatek isn’t really putting any effort into fixing the BE1400…If I understood what I was reading correctly.
I had no idea when I bought this how much of a mess the drivers were in. I saw great reviews online, open source hardware, and an active community and assumed it would be a fun, slam dunk project.
And @frank-w thank you so much for all your help. You’ve been helping me out on every single post I’ve made since day one and I really appreciate it. Im too stubborn to give up, so one way or the other I’m getting this thing working lol.
Hey I’m really considering getting that card until the issues are resolved with the WiFi-7 card.
My current AP is garbage and needs to be replaced anyway, and now the Broadcom SFP+ NIC in my Firewall is giving me trouble too. So I’m thinking of leveraging what I can from the R4 for now.
But I had a couple questions:
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Can two of those cards be ran at the same time to spread the load out over the two separate chips? (I know to turn sw4 off)
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They seem to be working with the mainline mt76 driver, but I can’t seem to find anyone simply saying “yes this card works properly”.
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Can a cheaper B key m.2 WiFi card function in the lte slot? Figured I could dedicate that to an “iot” network. I tried a small SSD in that slot already and it didn’t work.
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Are there any issues with the R4’s SFP ports? I haven’t even made it that far yet because the WiFi issue had all my attention. I’d be using one 2.5Gbe RJ45 transceiver to connect to my ISP and the other end would be a 10Gb connection to my LAN switch.
I’m asking because honestly I have only have one device that even supports WiFi-7, everything else is 6e or older anyway. So if those cards actually work properly I’d be fine until the BE1400 gets the kinks worked out.
Warning to anyone else, don’t buy a WiFi-7 router that’s under $200. It will suck. lol
Theoreticall it should work, But !!!ATTENTION!!! disable the 12v for the pcie before testing this… or check if the inserted card needs or is able to handle 12v or you kill the card.
You need a card that is already supported by openwrt, and need to install drivers and firmware or build it from source.
im planning something similar, got an old archer-c7 and wifi is fine for me only wifi5 but okay. its an pcie card in the archer, ill test if i can get it running in the bpi-r4. since the speed is limitited by the archer cpu. i get around 300/300mbit with software flow offloading in my kitchen with wifi5, the archer is sitting on top of the kitchen, 1 concrete ceilling between.
dont mind the upload, it begins with ~300mbit but my fibre is 500/50mbit so its slowly dropping to the 50mbit cap.
and for what i read all at all is that the BE-14 is not really faster if there is a wall in between cause of the bad snr