BeagleBone WiFi Adapter Range

[vttay03]

--I recently purchased the BeagleBone WiFi adapter and after a decent struggle, was able to get it to work under Angstrom. However, I literally have to place the BeagleBone within 5-10 feet of the router for it to act even close to reliable. Just moving the unit across the room causes a great deal of instability. This is far from what I expected - I was hoping to at least be able to move to the next level of my home and still get a reliable connection.

Anyways, I was wondering if this is normal and what most people have been experiencing? Does Adafruit have any information on what type of range they've been able to achieve? If I need to be within an earshot of the router, I might as well just run an ethernet cable so that I can have a reliable connection.

I did also end up getting the unit to work under Ubuntu on the BeagleBone and while the performance was improved slightly, it still wasn't anything to get terribly excited over.

[adafruit]

we've certainly gotten it to work from over 30 ft away - what happens when you do an iwlist scan? Also, we found A6 image worked a little better than A5, but honestly wifi usb support on the 'bone is a little clunky for reasons we don't understand (its not the module, its the computer)

[vttay03]

Not sure what you mean by the "A6" image, but I've been testing with the most recent file listed on the BeagleBone demo image website - filename is "Angstrom-Cloud9-IDE-GNOME-eglibc-ipk-v2012.05-beaglebone-2012.06.18.img.xz". Is this the image you are referring to?

I'm currently running an overnight test with a python script to try and gauge how reliable the connection is over an extended period of time - I'm pinging the Bone every half hour and logging whether I get a valid response or not.

The output of 'iwlist scan' is somewhat lengthy, is there a particular piece of information you're looking for? The output again will also depend on what my distance from the router is as well (meaning whether it picks up the network or not).

[adafruit]

iwlist scan tells you the strength of signals, its what you want to use to debug signal strength issues - look for the 'quality' number or similar for each entry.

Rev A6 image:
http://circuitco.com/support/index.php? ... n_A6_Image

[zimm0who0net]

It's not surprising that it doesn't have that large a range. Heck, look at how small it is!. Is there a version of the adapter that's larger or has an external antenna port?