Testing WIFI and GPS hardware

[Chris Jenks]

On Fri, 15 Aug 2008, arne anka wrote:

>> strength of 27/94 according to the "iwlist eth0 scan" command. Other
>> people have reported that WIFI to unsecured WAPs worked out-of-the-box,
>
> i think, you need at least to associate with the ap, ie use iwconfig to
> set the ap and maybe the channel.

OK, I se the ESSID and channel (obtained from iwlist eth0 scan) with

iwconfig eth0 essid "myap"
iwconfig eth0 channel 11

I notice that the output of iwconfig eth0 gives a setting for the access 
point:

eth0      AR6000 802.11g  ESSID:"myap"
           Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462 GHz  Access Point: 00:B4:63:97:AD:27
           Bit Rate=1 Mb/s   Tx-Power=15 dBm   Sensitivity=0/3
           Retry:on
           Encryption key:off
           Power Management:off
           Link Quality:188/94  Signal level:-163 dBm  Noise level:-96 dBm
           Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
           Tx excessive retries:13  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:13

and ifconfig eth0 gives values for received and transmitted data:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1F:3F:BE:45:2B
           inet6 addr: f58b::263:ceff:fd87:ed25/64 Scope:Link
           UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
           RX packets:429957 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
           TX packets:12080 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
           collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
           RX bytes:607951527 (579.7 MiB)  TX bytes:128021 (125.0 KiB)

but if I start pinging an external IP address from the Freerunner and pull 
the USB cable, pings stop returning until I plug the cable back in and 
restart networking on the host.

>>    Although I couldn't get WIFI to work under the "Locations" graphical
>> application (which says "Searching for your location" and then "ERROR:
>> Unable to locate a fix" when I turn on GPS), I haven't heard of much
>> success from others either.
>
> not sure, what you're talking about -- wifi or gps?

Sorry, I meant GPS, not WIFI.

[...]
> - do
> echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/s3c2440-i2c/i2c-adapter/i2c-0/0-0073/neo1973-pm-gps.0/pwron
> cat /dev/ttySAC1
> and watch the output, after a while the should be lines with all fields filled

I see the same group of lines repeating:

$GPRMC,,V,,,,,,,,,,N*53
$GPVTG,,,,,,,,,N*30
$GPGGA,,,,,,0,00,99.99,,,,,,*48
$GPGSA,A,1,,,,,,,,,,,,,99.99,99.99,99.99*30
$GPGSV,1,1,00*79
$GPGLL,,,,,,V,N*64
$GPZDA,,,,,00,00*48

but I'm not sure how to interpret them. Thanks for your help!

   Yours,

     Chris