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Topic: Improving Chaos Calmer 15.05 on MiWiFi

The content of this topic has been archived on 24 Apr 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

I have a MiWiFi which is an 802.11ac router from Xiaomi for around $35 USD.

I'm pretty fond of it but not fond of the poor Wi-Fi performance and the router seems to be crashing every 15 min on Chaos Calmer 15.05 RC3.. any ideas on where to get started?

syslog and dmesg don't show anything useful before crash.

From : http://en.miui.com/thread-64391-16-1.html

"On the PandoraBox Test build [09-Jul-2015] the 5Ghz works flawlessly with as strong signal as the stock firmware.
Edit : If anyone interested here is the direct file http://downloads.openwrt.org.cn/PandoraBox/Xiaomi-Mini-R1CM/testing/PandoraBox-ralink-mt7620-xiaomi-mini-squashfs-sysupgrade-r1140-20150709.bin"

Not sure what the differences are but the 5Ghz on the PandoraBox works well. 2.4Ghz..not so much.

I'll see if I can get the 5Ghz features from this and port them over to general OpenWRT.. also LuCI on PandoraBox is way more responsive.

One of the OpenWrt devs is working on support for this platform (I think it's blogic but not sure). You might want to check in with him?

Borromini wrote:

One of the OpenWrt devs is working on support for this platform (I think it's blogic but not sure). You might want to check in with him?


that is good news! i really wish the miwifi will become a fully supported device, as its pretty powerfull for the price.

Strange,

I have some of these devices, here is my uptime.
uptime
17:47:12 up 19 days,  1:57,  load average: 0.05, 0.02, 0.04

elektroman wrote:

Strange,

I have some of these devices, here is my uptime.
uptime
17:47:12 up 19 days,  1:57,  load average: 0.05, 0.02, 0.04

Uptime is nice but doesnt tell you about stable connectivity.

Some metrics I would consider :
- ping to google.com and to your router over Wi-Fi (2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz) whats your packet loss, min/avg/max ping? Also whats bandwidth: WLAN <-> WLAN , WLAN <-> LAN, LAN <-> LAN.

All these things and more need to be stable and performant.

On RC3 my Wi-Fi (5Ghz) reset every 15min. Decent bandwidth when it worked, was getting (60 - 65 Mbps WLAN <-> LAN)
2.4 Ghz was fairly slow.

I believe that pandora firmware is using proprietary driver, which was built from MTK's source code.

Felix is working on the open source mt7612e driver (5G of MiWiFi). You can find the project here: http://github.com/openwrt/mt76

Exciting. We will try our best to support WiTi Board,  let every geek can hack it.

(Last edited by sugar on 18 Aug 2015, 03:02)

I'm also proud user of MiWifi, It's great router for the price and I'm still waiting for fully working official OpenWRT build smile
Now we discuss, that wifi power on 15.05 is much weaker then on Pandorabox.
In my opinion It is due to regulation domain taken from EEPROM.
Can someone make "reghack" like on AR71xx? because now we can't even change country from China to anything else hmm
(I'm from Czech and here I can use 5470-5700 up to 27dBm. In China not)

Thanks and keep up the good work! smile

P.S. The WiTi looks very nice. Maybe I will buy it in future to make my own NAS server + web server for central heating smile

(Last edited by Benik3 on 27 Aug 2015, 23:48)

New owner of a MiWiFi, with 15.05 recently installed. I just wanted to say thanks to everyone contributing to this being supported. I'm looking forward to helping out where I can!

Benik3 wrote:

In my opinion It is due to regulation domain taken from EEPROM.
Can someone make "reghack" like on AR71xx? because now we can't even change country from China to anything else hmm

+1 for this one.
I just ordered this router, because of its great design combined with good functionality.
Without special country settings for Germany regarding freq/pwr it might violate official regulations.

https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/20335

https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/20338

https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/20343

https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/20364

with mt76 driver hack the 5G signal is improved but still lower than with proprietary driver and since it's only a hack not a fix txpower control is not working properly. when i was thinking about this i thought it might be that PA is not enabled and just now when searching for these tickets i see someone made a fix!! -> https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/20369

(Last edited by anarchy99 on 2 Sep 2015, 15:27)

Interesting. Well maybe the drivers from WiTi will help smile
BTW what is PA?

(Last edited by Benik3 on 2 Sep 2015, 19:43)

Can anyone pls tell me, what arch it expect for packages? (opkg print-architecture)
Thanks smile

Hello there. Can anyone pls build one FW with kernel enabled writing to u-boot?
I would like to update u-boot to Breed, but the mtd0 partition is only readable by default on OpenWRT. What I found, this should be possible to change in kernel before building an image...

Thanks smile

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