MT7615 adapter getting recognized but not turning on

Banana Pi Rockchip design
1

So I am trying to get my BPI R2-pro working with an MT7615 module by BPI running Armbian 23.02.2 kernel 6.1.11. The network interface shows up in ip a and the likes and the mt7615e kernel module gets loaded fine and I can even get the scan of nearby access points by using iwlist wlan0 scan, however I cannot bring the interface up using ifconfig and trying to connect to an access point using nmcli just gives an error: Error: No network with SSID 'XXXX' found.

iwconfig wlan0 up just fails silently.

Here’s what dmesg has to say about the adapter:

Summary 
[   15.164453] mt7615e 0002:01:00.0: Invalid MAC address, using random address 8a:85:12:a2:65:fc
[   15.199920] mt7615e 0002:01:00.0: HW/SW Version: 0x8a108a10, Build Time: 20180518100604a
[   15.213567] mt7615e 0002:01:00.0: N9 Firmware Version: _reserved_, Build Time: 20200814163649
[   15.219969] mt7615e 0002:01:00.0: CR4 Firmware Version: _reserved_, Build Time: 20181207140436

I am kind of lost at this point and would really appreciate if someone could help me with this one. Thank you.

2

just a shot in the dark… maybe you need wpa_supplicant package?

you should share more information about interface-status (which i guess is ok when scan works) your config for nmcli and additional debug…maybe try with wpa_supplicant directly

3

I am not sure what was the source of the problem, however I managed to solve it by first installing armbian-firmware-full and then configuring an AP from armbian-config. After that hostapd could successfully up the interface and broadcast. So I guess it was not a problem with the adapter itself, but with Armbian’s included software.