Skip to main content

SDIO WiFi

I have a SDIO WiFi module from a Sipeed Lichee Nano development board. These have the same chip as the onboard WiFi/bluetooth on the PinePhone (RTL8723BS).

On the PinePhone mmc0 is the SD card slot and mmc1 is the onboard RTL8723BS SDIO chip. mmc2 is the eMMC chip.

I inserted the Lichee Nano WiFi card into the SD card slot using the SD extension cable.

It's an odd fit. Since the board extends towards the connector.

It barely fits with the back cover in place.

The version I used is an older version you can find on eBay. The new smaller (black) version is too short. I could not close and lock the SD card cage on the extender on the smaller black version.

The Bluetooth on this chip is via UART, but the UART pins are not available on the micro SD module, so these are WiFi only.

On Manjaro Phosh it showed up as another SDIO device on mmc0.

It loaded the correct driver and shows up as wlan1. It works as expected. 

There aren't very many SDIO devices out there, most are WiFi/Bluetooth. This may only be useful if you manage to kill the onboard WiFi. There is the Red Bean 802.11ac SDIO module that should also work if you want 5GHz WiFi.


Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

veracrypt

I installed veracrypt on some of my PinePhones. There are no pre-compiled binaries for aarch64. Installation is from source. The process is simple and mostly follows the instructions on git . This has been tested on Manjaro Phosh and Arm Arch Linux. I compiled it as a cli only application. If you omit the NOGUI=1 it will compile the version with both cli/gui. It takes much longer to compile and the interface is not optimized for a mobile device. Install the required packages sudo pacman -S fuse2 yasm cppunit pkg-config Download the source for wxWidgets . The current stable is v3.0.5. wget https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/releases/download/v3.0.5/wxWidgets-3.0.5.tar.bz2 Extract and move to /usr/src tar -xf wxWidgets-3.0.5.tar.bz2 sudo mv wxWidgets-3.0.5 /usr/src/ Download the current stable veracrypt source wget https://github.com/veracrypt/VeraCrypt/archive/refs/tags/VeraCrypt_1.24-Update7.tar.gz Extract the files and change to the src directory tar -xf VeraCrypt_1.24-Update7.t...
Read more

Updating modem firmware

Updated to the latest available firmware. Instructions here: https://github.com/Biktorgj/quectel_eg25_recovery#readme Command to clone the latest branch:   git clone --branch EG25GGBR07A08M2G_01.003.01.003 https://github.com/Biktorgj/quectel_eg25_recovery.git Change directory and run update: cd quectel_eg25_recovery/ sudo ./qfirehose -f ./ To check the currently installed firmware: sudo mmcli -m any --command='AT+QGMR' Output of the entire process here: https://gist.github.com/8bitgc/247da58dd6bd53a6864d5afe091616c5
Read more

Franken-Phone

I decided to take the worst performing PinePhone PCB and turn it into a hardware test bed. This is the 3GB 1.2b upgrade board that fails my compiler and memtester tests . It will time jump even with the RAM running at 492MHz. It is usable. With the serial adapter you can login to the serial console without an attached screen. Once WiFi/SSH is configured you can do everything remotely. I have also used wayvnc to remotely connect to the graphical desktop. I bought a large flat aluminum heatsink from Amazon to use as a base. I cut up a sheet of thermal pad material (sold for use with 3d printer glass hot beds). The pad is sticky and holds the PCB and battery to the heatsink. The battery is not the correct type/size for a PinePhone battery. It is an old battery I found in a drawer that has the same pinout, works fine. The micro USB breakout board has the VBUS and Ground soldered directly to the pogo pin pads. The loose orange wire at the bottom is soldered to a tiny pad next to the ke...
Read more