I am trying to replace my ISP supplied router with a mini PC (PICOPC MNHO-048)
Installation has gone fine and I am testing it currently.
I would like to add WiFi. I could do this simply by adding another access point (probably an OpenWRT Home hub) but ideally would prefer to add a mini PCIE card and external antennas but ....
the card I have MC-AC7265 is not recognized
From other posts I gather that Intel WiFi can not be used for access points
Any suggestions as to a good way forward would be welcome
That's exactly what you should do.
Your mini PC is very unlikely to support two WLAN cards (2.4- and 5 GHz), nor would it be likely to power AP capable cards or get rid of the heat they produce (2*10 watts)). The forum search will reveal why setting up an AP on x86_64 is a bad idea.
Thank you for responding but I find your reply confusing.
There are plenty of wlan cards that support both (and blutooth) on a single card. So two cards is not a problem.
20W of heat - where does this figure come from. Few routers which usually support both frequencies draw that much power in total. Even my mobile phone can act as an WiFi hotspot (access point)
I don’t understand how an access point WiFi card is different. For phones and things like ESP32s they can operate in either mode.
I am not saying you are wrong but I would like to understand why.
Sure, but not at the same time. For that to work, you either need two WLAN cards or something like mt7915 in a DBDC configuration (halving your rx/ tx chains), 'normal' client-oriented WLAN cards do not support this (and would be 2x2 anyways).
…and both aren't good at it, in terms of range, throughput and the allowed maximum number of connected clients (for the esp32-s3, this is limited to 10 connected STAs (at very basic performance), for the typical client oriented PCIe card it's usually even lower). In AP mode, special consideration also needs to be taken for number of rx/ tx chains, beamforming, allowed interface combinations, support for powersaving clients and decent DFS support. There is a difference between client-oriented/ cheap WLAN cards and those required for AP usage, yes the former work for lab testing in a very limited fashion, but not in production.
Again, the forum search has more detailed explanations.
EDIT: of course it's possible, it just gets expensive, needs quite some experimenting to get the antenna array mostly right, isn't 'neat' (mainboards with the required slots usually start at µATX or at least proprietary half-height SFF systems) and are not light on the electricity bill. Offloading the AP functionality to a random purpose-built plastic WiFi router is cheaper, faster and needs less power/ noise.
depending on your needs and the box in question i’d say your first easiest stop is to buy a mediatek based usb adapter like the edup ax3000 (which let you unscrew the antennas it comes with) and optionally then a base/antenna thing to screw it into, I think fenvi is a brand on aliexpress that sell such a thing
yes, this only allows you to run one wireless network as an AP, and yes if you are using virtualization then assigning usb devices to VMs can be suboptimal performance wise, but if you only have a couple of people in an apartment or so you have to ask “do I need more than this ?”
as far as mini pcie / m2 cards go, the realtek based rtl8852 are confirmed to work from my experience but again have the same limitation of only one wireless network, and trying to get antennas going is going to be a hassle with a mini pc unless you use the ones it comes with
not sure after that, again depending on your needs this is maybe where you consider a cheap mt7621 based wireless router just to be an AP, only uses 2-3 watts, does the job etc
I would agree that there’s a chance it won’t work, I think the chance is lower than it used to be but of course I won’t say it’s going to work perfectly but at the end of the day having one of these adapters can be handy anyway and it’s not like we’re talking 000s of dollars on hardware to get ripped off on here
I'm not the one to ask here, but the OP referred to the esp32 ecosystem, which tends to come in packs…
The 32 STA limit (and how to extend it) of ath10k-ct has been a topic here several times. We're no longer in the days of yore, where you might have used 1-3 clients tops - phones, computers, notebooks, alexa/ siri, TV sets, printers, washing machines, IoT/ smarthome (esp32), wireless surveillance cameras, …
(I currently have 18 wireless devices connected to my APs (and that's omitting 4 that are using a dedicated AP for $reasons), and I'm about to log off now).
USB cannot be virtualized or (really be-) passed through into the VM, it needs a rather slow emulation. This often works for slow devices (usb2serial, fingerprint readers, etc.), but fails spectacularly with fast devices - WLAN cards require driver <--> firmware communication in time, realtime'ish, if that fails, it breaks hard (ranging between 'just doesn't work', VM crashing, host crashing). Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
Well, it’s a setup I currently use with no crashes and speeds that can exceed 20megabytes/s which is all I need to do some browsing / watch streams etc. The box the adapter is plugged into is pretty new though, 16 core 255h based motherboard but yeah no single core gets maxed out doing this emulation /shrug.
