Current suggestions for Wifi Adapaters for UP boards

Kurt

Recently I ordered an Intel R200 Robotics development kit from Mouser, which came with a new UP board. I should have checked if it also came with a wifi adapter (it did not...).

I am soon going to mount this in a Turtlebot3 Waffle PI (to replace the PI and camera).

Wondering which Wifi Adapter to use. I am probably asking this after all of the horses left with the open barn door as I ordered a couple of adapters from Amazon, which should ship tonight, but...

I decided to not order the same one as the UP ships and I have on my other UP board as would prefer to not purchase another one that you have to replace the drivers to make work OK...

Likewise I have some older edimax dongles which I have used in Odroids and earlier RPI boards.

What I have ordered include:
Panda Mini Wifi 150Mbps Wireless N USB Adapter

SparkLAN WUBR-508N(PU) / 802.11a/b/g/n 2x2 MIMO / USB Module with Printed Antenna + USB Type A (Ralink RT5572)

I believe I saw reference to both of these either by name like Panda or by chip type RT5572.

Any better suggestion? If not I will probably start by trying the Sparklan adapter as it is higher speed...

Thanks
Kurt

Edit: Forgot to mention I am running Ubuntu 16.04 on this board

Kurt

So far the SparkLan... Is working. Will see how it works when used with ROS...

Douwe van Nijnatten

Hi Kurt,

I am running into wifi adapter issues as well. Do you perhaps have an update on which adapters run smoothly on the UP and which didn't?

Thanks,
Douwe

Kurt

Hopefully someone will jump in and make some suggestions. I first tried the SparkLan one, but I ran into some issues, don't remember exactly what, so I have stuck using the Panda. So far I have not run into any issues with it, but I have not been doing much with it lately.

DoNcK

I have two boards with two different USB WiFi adapters:

The first one is a 802.11N Edimax EW-7811Un USB "N150 Nano dongle" :

Despite being an "amazon's choice" and being recommended for Raspberry Pi setups on a lot of online shops, I could not get good results with this one. It encounters frequent WiFi drops. Periodically, it enters some sort of zombie mode: the system does not seem to notice anything wrong, but all packets get lost.
I spent a lot of time trying tweaks I found on Internet (preventing powersave mode...) but none of them could fix the connection drops issue :-(
I also tried improving the power supply but it did not fix the problem.
I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS ONE
Regarding my tests, I was using Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 and the board was just a few meters from the AP with a good signal reception.

lsusb reports:

Bus 001 Device 028: ID 7392:7811 Edimax Technology Co., Ltd EW-7811Un 802.11n Wireless Adapter [Realtek RTL8188CUS]

On my other board, I use an Alfa Network 802.11 B/G/N adapter:

It is all but a nano dongle, but at least IT WORKS PERFECTLY FINE :-)
The reference of the model is AWUS036NHA and it uses an Atheros AR9271. It has a clip an external 5 dBi antenna.
This second test was run in the same conditions than for the first one.

lsusb reports:

Bus 001 Device 012: ID 0cf3:9271 Atheros Communications, Inc. AR9271 802.11n

edit:
I have another nano dongle: Realtek "mini wifi module #814b". This one seems to do the job, here is the lsusb report:

Bus 002 Device 017: ID 0bda:8176 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8188CUS 802.11n WLAN Adapter